


Safe as Houses

by Laughsalot3412



Series: Psychic AU [2]
Category: Leverage
Genre: Everyone is TRYING okay?, Mind Rape, Psychic AU, There is so much cuddling, Things aren't as okay as they think, they love each other a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-04 23:16:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 44,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6679567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laughsalot3412/pseuds/Laughsalot3412
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Everything was fine. Everything was good.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, when I wrote the first story, I didn't think people would actually...read it? Thank you so much for all your comments and niceness. I was honestly really blown away. Hope you enjoy the sequel where EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE! 
> 
> As always, v_vulpes made this happen. Bug her to write her Eliot, Quinn, and Moreau prequel you guys because it is amazing.
> 
> Also, serious dub-con ahead. Mind the gap.

The night after they took down Damien Moreau, Hardison didn’t sleep.

Eliot passed out on the couch sometime around midnight, which pretty much defied explanation. Parker curled up in one of the armchairs.

Every time Hardison closed his eyes, he was back in that suite with Moreau’s breath on his neck and Eliot under his hands.

Around three o’clock, Hardison was exhausted enough to try again. His eyes were gritty, and the words on his laptop were blurring together. So he tiptoed upstairs and collapsed on one of the beds. He left the light on, because there was no way he could handle being in the dark right now.

He didn’t feel asleep, because he was still exhausted. How could he be exhausted and asleep at the same time?

But he had to be asleep, because Eliot was on the bed with him, and Eliot had a knife sawing through his chest, and the hand on the knife was Hardison’s. He could feel the resistance of the bones as he tried to drag the blade through Eliot’s body, and Eliot was taking controlled breaths and saying, “We’re fine, Hardison. It’s fine.”

Yeah. So.

He didn’t really need sleep, after all. Sleep was for people who weren’t up for a fourth Doctor Who re-watch or who didn’t have Parker’s stash of chocolate espresso.

(“ _Hardison, snap out of it! Chocolate espresso!_ ”)

Okay, maybe just his stash of orange soda. Yep. That would be fine.

Hardison realized he was sitting in the middle of the bed hugging a pillow to his chest like it would somehow protect him.

He wanted to call Nanna and hear her sharp, no-nonsense voice on the other end of the line.

He imagined how that conversation would go: _Hey Nanna, I used my powers to violate my friend today. He’s cool with it, and I feel like I’ve swallowed something that’s on fire. How are you?_

(When he was a kid, Nanna had told him that empathy was the best psychic power anyone could have, and did he know why? Because it helped people.)

 

 

* * * *

 

For Eliot, happiness had always been heavy.

Happiness was his father’s hand resting on his shoulder, a smart woman in his lap, or exhaustion dragging at his muscles. It was something that anchored him, keeping him present in a way only pain could match.

“Come out and let us see you,” Parker demanded from the other side of the door.

“Don’t be shy,” Hardison said.

“This ain’t a fashion show,” he called back, because they expected it and because his grumbling made them smile.

“Mean suburban is a tricky look,” Parker said. “Show us!”

Their voices pressed him down with a welcomed weight. He was aware of every one of his heartbeats, of the buzz of the florescent lightbulbs overhead, of the scratched paint on the inside of the dressing room door. This kind of happiness made every detail important.

He pushed open the rickety door of the dressing room. Parker and Hardison were sitting in plastic chairs near the mirror, waiting for him.

When they saw him, they both broke into expressions of glee. Eliot’s chest was so heavy, he could barely breathe.

“Kakis and a polo?” Hardison was laughing now, in a way he hadn’t for days. That settled it, Eliot was buying this hideous outfit. “You look like a Geek Squad member!”

“I could break your arm.”

“Sure, sure.”

“I’m serious.”

“Uh huh.”

There was something intoxicating about watching them shrug off his threats. People had begged him on their knees for the same thing these two assumed was theirs by default.

Parker prowled around him in a satisfied circle. “Your clothes look like what Randy’s dad wears. That’s good. Sophie told me that people like other people who look like them, so the dad will be more willing to talk to you.”

“A con is the only thing that could get me to step foot in a Sears,” Hardison said. “Buying clothes here? Lord have mercy.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Sears,” Eliot said. “Their axes are pretty sturdy, actually.”

“Do I want to know?”

“Probably not.”

Parker’s hands darted out and snapped the sales tags off the shirt. “Okay, let’s go.”

“We have to pay for this stuff,” Eliot said.

“Why?”

“Because—because that’s what you do.”

“It’s not what I do.”

“I mean people. Other people who aren’t thieves.”

Parker digested this. “Is this another good guy thing?”

Eliot looked to Hardison for backup, but Hardison was staring at the floor. He’d retreated suddenly out of the conversation, going back to the quiet he’d been sunk in all day. Dammit, Eliot and Parker had worked for hours to get him out of his head.

“Yes,” Eliot told Parker shortly and walked back into the changing room.

They’d left Nate’s apartment behind that morning. The farther away from Boston they drove in Eliot’s car, the quieter Hardison had become. It didn’t take a telepath to figure out that he was stewing in what had happened with Moreau yesterday. Hardison probably didn’t feel like the good guy.

Eliot hurried back into his regular clothes. The bandages on his hand caught on the zipper of his jeans. Ridiculous. His hand wasn’t that hurt, but they wouldn’t let him take the bandage off, so he was stuck with it.

“Let’s see this house you rented for us,” Eliot said, letting the changing room door bang against the wall.

Hardison still looked subdued. “Okay.”

“I want to do more surveillance.” Parker tugged Hardison out of his chair and twined her arm through his. “I was getting good with that fancy camera.”

“Okay,” Hardison said.

“Rental house first,” Eliot said firmly. He led the way through the store to the checkout. He didn’t have to look back to know they were following. “We’ve been working all day and it’s late. We can take more pictures of the Trents tomorrow.”

“Fine,” Parker said. She jabbed him in the back with her finger. “It had better be a cool house.”

“It’s not that far from Randy’s neighborhood,” Hardison offered.

“But is it cool?”

“Parker, you know I wouldn’t put you in a lame house. Where is the trust, woman?”

There. That tone was more what Eliot had been fishing for when he’d asked about the house. “This coming from the guy who probably plastered his room with movie posters growing up.”

“That is a longstanding nerd tradition, and I refuse to be ashamed.”

 

 

The house was pretty cool, Eliot had to admit. It was a townhouse—narrow and tall, all the levels stacked on top of each other. There were two bedrooms this time, one on the third floor and one on the second, which was going to make it harder to guard if Parker and Hardison wanted to sleep at the same time.

“I miss Nate’s metal staircase,” Parker said. She slung her bag into the living room and used her powers to jump up an entire flight of stairs. “But I like how tall this house is!”

“I figured we would only need this place for a few days,” Hardison said. He dropped his overflowing bag of tech beside Parker’s. “I didn’t want to get a hotel because—I just didn’t.”

Hardison very carefully did not look at Eliot. He looked at the living room instead, seeming fascinated by the one couch.

“Kitchen is small,” Eliot said. It had a half wall dividing it from the living room. Eliot liked that. He could cook and watch the door.

“Sorry, man. I tried.”

Hardison looked so sad.

Eliot flung his duffle down next to theirs. “This is ridiculous.”

Hardison started digging through his bag in alarm. “No, it’s cool, I’ll find us a new place. Better kitchen, check. Message received. How big is big enough?” He sat on the floor, frantically typing.

“Dammit Hardison, that’s not what I meant.”

“I don’t mind. I can do it. It’s easy, promise.”

“I don’t want another house.”

“Then what do you want?” Awesome, here came the hysteria. “Indoor pool? Another car? The national bank of Iceland? Say the word.”

Eliot settled himself cross-legged on the floor in front of Hardison, so close their knees bumped. “You know what I want, remember?”

Hardison rocked backward, clutching his computer in front of him like a shield. “Man, don’t throw that in my face. I can’t help it.”

“So don’t try.”

“I’m sorry, _what?_ Didn’t we have a conversation about not doing readings for a while? I distinctly remember having that conversation while you were bleeding all over Nate’s apartment.”

Here was how Eliot saw it: Hardison and Parker had made Eliot theirs. A few days later, they had destroyed the only other person who could contest that claim. Eliot had a place, and the certainty of it made that heavy happiness come crashing down on him again.

His place was to look after them, and he intended to do it. Fortunately, Eliot excelled at taking care of psychics—especially overdramatic empaths.

“It’s been a while by now,” Eliot said reasonably.

Hardison was gaping at him like he’d suggested unplugging the wifi. “It’s been twenty-six hours!”

Eliot’s brain was as refreshing for empaths as a deep sleep and more enjoyable than—well, most other things. A reading would help Hardison feel better and calm down. So, Eliot needed to let him in. It was simple math.

“That’s long enough,” Eliot said.

“I was thinking more along the lines of several weeks. Months. Maybe never.”

No. That was just—no.

“I’ve told you a million times, we’re good, Hardison.”

“And I’ve told you a million times, no we’re not.”

Hardison was glaring at Eliot now, which was at least better than looking sad. Eliot glared right back at him. “What do I want right now?”

Hardison’s glare was not up to code. It was quickly crumbling into panic. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, just because you want something doesn’t mean it’s good for you.”

“I think I’m the best judge of what’s good for me.”

“Maybe I know you better than you know yourself. Ever think of that?”

“If that’s the case, smart guy, then you know what I want.”

He wanted Hardison in his head. He’d wanted it ever since he saw how upset Hardison was, somewhere an hour outside of Boston. This was his damn job, and he wanted to do it.

It was that _want_ that he blasted in Hardison’s direction when he covered Hardison’s hand with his own.

Hardison choked on whatever comeback he had been planning to say. His eyes were fixed on their hands, wrapped together. “You’re playing dirty pool, Eliot.”

“You know what they say. All’s fair.”

“Didn’t know we were in a war.”

“We’re not.”

Hardison had his fingers tight around Eliot’s wrist now. It felt like happiness.

Eliot breathed out and relaxed his mind. He knew that it drew empaths in when he did that, an invitation he’d never seen refused.

“You sure?” Hardison asked.

Eliot was very sure.

“How? After what I did?” Hardison was holding out, wavering on the fringes of Eliot’s mind. “That was messed up. We both know it. How can you want anyone inside your head, especially me? You can’t want this.”

Eliot didn’t know how to explain it, the desperation to tear himself open and bleed out for them. He wanted to sharpen his knives, teach Hardison where to cut, and let Parker decide if they should. It had been so long since he had a function he actually had peace about fulfilling and he was drunk on it.

He couldn’t explain that, but with Hardison, he didn’t need to explain. He only had to feel.

“Geez,” Hardison breathed. “I believe you. You can ease up.”

“I can’t. This is just how it is.”

Hardison’s eyes closed. “You’re a little scary, you know that?”

Eliot closed his eyes when he felt Hardison’s mind slide into his. With an empath in his head, everything felt fuller and more vivid. Better. It was a quirk of his brain after so long with Moreau. _Addict_ , Moreau had called him, back in that suite.

Eliot’s stomach twisted and he shoved the sensation ruthlessly aside. What they were doing was not the same. It was different because it was Hardison.

Hardison’s mind brushed up against his. Eliot suppressed a shudder. That was something Moreau had never done, open up to Eliot in return, let Eliot feel some of the feedback of what he was feeling. Other empaths had. Eliot had never been sure why—whether they thought they were being kind by bringing him into the experience or whether they enjoyed his revulsion.

With Hardison, he told himself firmly, it was different.

“Talk,” Eliot said. His voice came out thin.

Hardison’s presence started to withdraw.

“No, don’t.” Eliot pushed himself closer to Hardison, chasing that bright fullness. “Just talk.”

“I need to get a booster for the internet in this place,” Hardison said, immediately. “My shows are going to start up again soon, and I am not missing my mid-season premieres because of crappy bandwidth. Though how _Supernatural_ got eleven seasons is still a mystery to me. Have you seen that show? Two white dudes in an American muscle car saving people? You’d probably like it.”

Eliot ignored the actual words and focused on the cadence of Hardison’s voice. It rose and fell in time with the presence inside his head. Hardison sounded happy, and Eliot had made him that way, and that was exactly what Eliot wanted.

“Okay,” Hardison said quietly. “Okay, as long as you’re sure. If this is what you want, this is what we’ll do.”

 

 

* * * *

 

When Parker came downstairs, the boys were doing empath things.

It was kind of surprising, actually. Parker remembered Hardison’s panic from yesterday. He had said they shouldn’t do this for a while.

Well, apparently they’d changed their minds. Weird, but okay.

Parker walked into the room softly, so she didn’t disturb them. Hardison and Eliot were both sitting cross-legged on the floor, so close that their knees slotted together. Hardison was holding Eliot’s wrist, and Eliot had his bandaged hand on Hardison’s leg.

Parker liked Hardison, but she didn’t want him in her head the way he got into Eliot’s, even if he could. So it was good that their more-than-team had expanded to include Eliot. He and Hardison gave each other things she didn’t give them—and that was good, right?

Just because the thought of doing what they were doing made her feel icky didn’t mean they were doing an icky thing. Parker was a little strange, she knew that. She was different.

“Parker,” Hardison said, voice low. He’d opened his eyes. Eliot hadn’t. “You want to come here? Just to sit?”

Sitting sounded nice.

Parker wiggled her way into the space Hardison made for her, tucking her knees up under her chin to fit. Hardison wrapped his free hand around her ankle, which was a funny place to put it and made her giggle. Hardison smiled at her.

Eliot opened his eyes and blinked a welcoming sort of blink. She blinked back at him before Eliot closed his eyes again.

They sat together like that for a long time. Parker usually got bored with inactivity, but this was okay. She could hear Hardison and Eliot’s breathing, and sometimes Hardison would talk about random stuff for a little bit before going quiet again. Partway through, Eliot started to shiver, so Parker rubbed his arm until he stopped. She hadn’t thought it was that cold in the townhouse.

Eventually, Hardison sighed and drew back from Eliot. Eliot made a sound somewhere close to the hurt scale.

Hardison squeezed his hand before letting it drop. “Wow.”

Eliot seemed pleased, but woozily so. It was probably good they were sitting down.

“Good?” he asked.

“Yes.” Hardison knocked Eliot’s knee with his. “You?”

“All good.” Eliot raised his eyebrows at her. “Hello, Parker.”

“Hi. Did you make Hardison feel less bad?”

Eliot turned his questioning face to Hardison.

Hardison looked much, much happier than he had since yesterday. “Eliot, you still make no sense, and I want that on the record. But thanks, man.”

Eliot’s wide-open smile was the kind she’d seen once before—with Eliot on his back, looking up at Damien Moreau.

She wasn’t sure she liked it, even though Eliot’s smiles were on her Always Good list.

Maybe they had to be demoted to Sometimes Good.

“Let’s talk about Randal Trent,” she said, loud enough to scare that smile off Eliot’s face.

It worked, like she’d known it would. He frowned at her. “What about him? We must have taken hundreds of pictures of them today. Trent’s an asshole with asshole cops as friends.”

Hardison jumped in with more enthusiasm than he’d shown all day. “He’s definitely hurting his kid. A kid who he apparently named after himself, by the way, which seems a little narcissistic.”

“We can’t call child services,” Parker said. “They’d just get the Bureau involved.”

Eliot was looking grim, which was definitely better than that smile. “We could just take him out.”

Parker had considered it. “Not good-guy enough,” she said sadly.

“Right, yeah, let’s not put _murder_ on the agenda,” Hardison said. “Why do I even have to clarify this?”

“Because he’s hurting his kid,” Parker said. Eliot understood. She saw her own urgency mirrored in his face. “We take Randy and give him to Nanna.”

Eliot was definitely not smiling now. “He might not want to come with us.”

 “Why not?”

“Sometimes people’s heads get twisted up.”

“People don’t want to stay with people who hurt them.”

Eliot pulled away from them and stood up. “It ain’t always that simple.”

“Yes, it is!” Parker insisted. She jumped up to follow him as he went into the kitchen.

Eliot acted like he hadn’t heard her. “What if Randy wants to stay, huh? What are we going to do then?”

Randy was a small boy, easy to hurt. She needed him out of the reach of big men with pain-giving hands.

There had been too much hurt in the past few days. She needed everyone to be safe.

“Parker,” Hardison said. There was warning in his voice, but Parker didn’t know where the danger was.

At least, she didn’t until she caught a glimpse of Eliot’s face as he closed the refrigerator. He looked angry, but he also looked…something else.

She thought about Eliot smiling up at Moreau.

Parker might be different, but she understood some stuff.

“We’ll steal him,” she said.

“You do know that’s considered kidnapping,” Hardison said.

“I don’t care.” She was watching Eliot very carefully to make sure he understood.

He shook his head and she didn’t think he did.

Sophie always said that in relationships, you had to be direct and honest.

Parker could be direct.

She sprang at Eliot, backing him up against the door of the refrigerator. Hardison didn’t like that, judging by his raised voice, but she wasn’t paying attention to him.

Eliot watched her warily, their faces inches apart. She knew he would stay there until she said he could go.

“I stole you from Moreau,” she said, trying to make her voice reach down into the deepest parts of him, so he’d never forget. “And if someone takes you and twists you up again, it won’t matter if you want to stay with them. I’m going to steal you back and Hardison will untwist you. Just like we’re going to steal Randy and untwist him.”

Sophie had been right, she felt better saying that out loud. Eliot settled back against the refrigerator, and she knew he felt better too. She used her powers to press him against the metal. Not hard enough to hurt, just so he knew she had him.

That angry-and-something-else look slipped off his face and left calm behind. He was looking her right in the eyes, talking to her without using words the way the two of them sometimes could. Her powers were saying, _No one can take you away_ and _You’re ours._ His face was saying, _Good_ and _That’s what I want._

She drew her powers back because she wanted to see what he would do.

Eliot tipped his chin up and to the side, like he was offering his throat.

She grinned at him, all teeth, and he laughed.

“Parker, let him _go_ ,” Hardison said, right by her ear.

“I’m not holding him,” she said.

Eliot’s smile was a quick, secret thing that looked right on his face. He knew what Parker knew—that wasn’t exactly the truth.

 

* * * *

 

Hardison had been taught not to look a gift horse in the mouth, not to push his luck, and so on. Nanna had always said be grateful for the good that life threw at you, because of how rare it was.

So that night, in their little temporary townhouse, Hardison decided to believe Eliot. Hardison decided to trust that Eliot knew what he wanted and be grateful that he and Parker had made the shortlist.

(Everything was fine. Everything was _good._ )

Parker was always telling him to listen to Eliot. Eliot had shown him in no uncertain terms that he wanted Hardison in his head. It was undeniable. Any weird squiggly feelings in Hardison’s stomach could shut up, because they clearly didn’t know what they were talking about, and Hardison refused to listen to them anymore.

Besides, he didn’t have time for them. Hardison was too busy reeling from the emotions Eliot was giving off right now.

Eliot’s baseline was always intense. So when he actually felt strongly about something, it was a nuclear explosion—mushroom cloud and flatted trees and everything. Hardison had felt this level of force from him before, back with Moreau, but that had been painful things: fear, anger, disgust.

Now, Eliot was feeling happiness and giddiness with the same kind of intensity. It was like he’d mixed six energy drinks with Hardison’s first kiss and the opening night of the new _Star Wars_ , and then injected the solution into Hardison’s veins.

Eliot knew what he was doing, too. And because Eliot was terrible, he kept brushing against Hardison and smirking when Hardison jumped.

“You are terrible,” Hardison informed.

Eliot gave him his best innocent face as he looked up from the chicken filets he was browning. “What, man?”

“You ain’t fooling anyone over there, with your hair and your food and your damn bandanas.”

“What’s wrong with Eliot’s bandanas?” Parker asked. She looked calmer. Whatever weird shoving around she and Eliot had engaged in had settled both their nerves.

“Nothing’s wrong with them,” Hardison said. “I’m just saying they ain’t fooling anyone, that’s all.”

“Eliot, you need grifter bandanas,” Parker said.

“Get me some and I’ll wear them.”

Parker took this seriously. “Sophie will have some. She always knows stuff about clothes.”

“Good idea,” Eliot said, just as seriously. He reached over to grab his sliced mushrooms from the counter and the back of his knuckles skimmed against Hardison’s arm, tracing a line of fire that was the best thing Hardison had ever felt.

He wasn’t sure what sound he made, but Parker laughed at him. Eliot’s smirk was ridiculously self-satisfied.

“ _Terrible,_ ” Hardison repeated. “So, so terrible.”

No one pointed out that Hardison didn’t have to be leaning against the counter within easy reach.

“Eliot, make him squeak again,” Parker said, bouncing up and down.

“Oh no,” Hardison said. “I know that face. That’s your, ‘Discovering the Song that Never Ends’ face.”

“That song is great,” Parker said. “You can just keep singing it! Eliot, make him do it.”

“Do what?” Eliot’s hands were scarily fast. Hardison didn’t even see them move before he felt a tingle of sweet shock on the underside of his elbow.

“That!”

“This?”

Hardison was going to shiver out of his skin. “Both of your hands are full! How the hell are you doing that?”

“Hand-eye coordination, Hardison. Some of us have it.”

“Me!” Parker’s hand shot into the air.

Eliot tossed the pepper grinder he’d been holding over his shoulder and she snatched it effortlessly before throwing it back to him.

“I don’t like pepper,” she said.

“Should have said something before I put it on the chicken, then.”

“Eliot!”

“Tough luck, Parker.”

“ _Eliot!”_

Eliot had not, in fact, put pepper on the chicken.

The room felt so full of the three of them--everything they were together, everything they could be.

Parker flung herself at Hardison. He braced himself against the counter and caught her, an armful of motion. “He didn’t really,” she whispered in his ear. “I saw.”

“I know,” he whispered back.

Parker’s arms and legs were wrapped around him in the Parker version of a hug. She didn’t usually want to hug, but when she did, she leveled up. “There’s lots of feelings right now. In me.” 

“That okay?”

She tucked her face into the crook of his neck and held on tighter. “Yes.”

Eliot was watching them. Not many people looked at Hardison like that and he’d be damned if he was going to take it for granted.

He reached out his hand to draw Eliot in closer.

Eliot stepped forward to meet him halfway, but he didn’t take his hand. He grabbed onto Hardison’s wrist instead, and he opened his mind, and Hardison was just—

lost.

Parker was a sturdy weight, the only thing keeping Hardison inside himself.

There was so much and it was all good. Hardison shouldn’t be the only one to feel this good—Eliot deserved to feel amazing too. Hardison wanted him to feel just as good as he was feeling. Eliot _needed_ to.

Eliot’s hand clenched suddenly tight. But then he was laughing, and that made Parker laugh, vibrating against Hardison’s chest, and that made Hardison laugh. It was an endless loop. Pleasure echoed into pleasure echoed into…

(Eliot’s hand clamped down so tightly, Hardison still had the mark when he went to sleep.)

 

 

 

The next day, Parker bullied them out of the house at an ungodly hour for a Saturday.

“I hate,” Hardison said.

“Hate what?” Eliot looked tired too, but his tone said he was willing to humor him.

“Everything.”

“It’s nine o’clock, man. That’s practically half your morning you slept away.”

“Do not talk to me unless you have coffee in the car.”

“Yep.”

Hardison wrenched the car door open and sure enough, a miracle: three coffees nestled in the cup holders.

Hardison sank into the passenger seat and cradled a cup in his hands. “You are the world’s best person and everything you do is perfect. I will never say anything bad about your punchy ways ever again.”

“You just broke Eliot,” Parker said. She shoved her way past him to get to the back seat.

“Huh?”

But Eliot was already sliding into the driver’s seat, and he looked normal. Maybe a bit more flushed than usual.

Okay, he didn’t look _normal._  He was wearing the terrible Sears outfit from yesterday. Hardison snickered.

“Just wait until Parker picks you out a costume someday,” Eliot growled. “I’m going to take pictures. Why do I have to be the grifter?”

“Because you’re the only white dude we’ve got,” Hardison said. “Trent pre-ordered _American Sniper_ on DVD. He gave thumbs ups to Donald Trump speeches on YouTube. We want him to open up, not have an aneurysm because a black man or a woman is talking to him.”

“We kind of want him to have an aneurysm, though. Don’t we?” Parker asked.

“Not in front of his kid,” Eliot said.

The plan was straightforward. Find out what Randal Trent cared for more than he cared for his son, and use that as leverage to ensure he wouldn’t bother Randy again.

Eliot let them out a block away from the Trent house. Hardison moved slowly, strangely reluctant.

“Feels weird splitting up,” Parker said, echoing his thoughts.

Eliot rolled down his window.

“We’ll have you on comms,” Hardison said.

“I am literally going a block down the street.”

“So go,” Parker said. “And come back.”

Eliot drove away, looking like he thought they were idiots.

The last time Hardison had left Eliot alone, Parker had dragged him back with his brain on fire. So.

“Eliot could take this guy,” Parker said. They started walking down the sidewalk in the other direction.

“In my sleep,” Eliot grumbled in Hardison’s ear. His voice changed. “Oh hey there. Just checking out the neighborhood, you know. Making sure it’s the kind of place a man can raise his family right.”

Eliot on the grift was impressive. He sounded different—harmless.

“He’s good,” Parker said, as Eliot talked his way into Trent’s house.

“You know, he is.”

Eliot’s voice got a little faster over the comms.

Parker and Hardison reached the community park, where they’d noticed Randy hanging out the day before. Sure enough, he was sitting on a swing, dragging his feet.

“Hardison,” Parker said, urgently. She gripped his hand.

“I know, babe, I see it.”

Randy had a broken arm resting in a sling. It hadn’t been like that yesterday afternoon.

“We have to get him out. Right now.”

“Rehanging cabinets can be a hell of a mess. Always good to have a _plan_ ,” Eliot’s voice said, a little more forceful than necessary.

Parker let out her impatience in a long, slow hiss.

“Eliot’s right,” Hardison said. “We have a plan. We’ll help him.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

They watched Randy for as long as they could without being suspicious before turning around and walking slowly back.

Randal Trent turned out to be one of those people who liked to pontificate about areas he viewed as his expertise. By Hardison’s count, he lectured Eliot about twenty-seven separate areas.

And it was good info, really. Eliot was doing a great job of drawing him out, helping them build a profile of the mark.

But it was taking forever.

Hardison wanted Eliot back. The feeling didn’t make sense. They could see the roof of Trent’s house from where they were walking and hear Eliot’s voice in the comms, so they knew he wasn’t in any danger.

It didn’t matter. Logic had nothing to do with it.

This time when Parker squeezed his hand, it was for his reassurance, not hers.

Eliot’s voice cut through Trent’s rant on the proper way to grill steak. “Look, man, I’ve got to get going. I appreciate the tour.”

His grifter voice was slipping a little, letting in some of his Eliot growl. Clearly he wanted out of there too.

“Corner of Pine and Maple,” Parker told him.

Ninety seconds later, Eliot’s car ripped down the quiet street and stopped beside them.

Hardison didn’t care if it didn’t make sense—he flung himself into the car as quickly as he could. If it had been anyone other than Eliot, he would have wrapped them up in the biggest hug of their lives. But Eliot didn’t like that kind of thing, so Hardison kept his hands to himself. “I thought that guy was going to talk us into our middle age.”

“You’re telling me.” Eliot’s fingers tapped the steering wheel in an impatient gesture Hardison didn’t associate with him.

Parker sat in Hardison’s lap and closed the door. “Okay, go.”

“That’s not safe,” Eliot said. “Sit in the back.”

“You won’t crash us. Go.”

The drive back to the townhouse was silent and charged. Hardison felt the tension in Parker’s body. Eliot’s emotions felt weirdly flat, such a sharp contrast to yesterday that Hardison eventually couldn’t handle it anymore. “Did Trent do something?”

“No.” Eliot glanced over. “You were on the comms, you heard.”

Even Eliot’s confusion was greyer than normal.

Hardison’s hands wanted to touch him, so he wrapped them around Parker instead.

They had plans to make when they got back and they all knew it. But as soon as they closed the front door behind them, Parker said, “You guys should—” right as Hardison and Eliot started to say, “Do you want to—” and “Let’s—”

Eliot rolled his eyes, but when he took Hardison’s wrist, Hardison could feel his relief.

It didn’t make _sense._ Except Hardison also felt the same. When Parker herded them upstairs and Eliot sat him down on the couch, it soothed an ache Hardison hadn’t even known was there.

“Sorry,” Eliot said, dropping down beside him, crowding Hardison back against the arm of the couch. “My fault.”

“What is?”

Eliot’s emotions turned rueful, a flavor like rye bread. Already, things in his head were brighter and more vibrant. “Never mind. Just. Just, let me—”

Eliot put both his hands to Hardison’s temples, in a way Hardison wasn’t allowed to do. Eliot had never done that before and Hardison felt the change right away. There was nothing slow about this, nothing soft. It was like standing next to the nozzle of a firehose. Eliot’s emotions came at him with so much force, they stung—and the sting was delicious.

Eliot was so extremely good at this.

Hardison bumped his mind against Eliot’s in _Thank you, yes, good._

(Something cold slithered against Hardison before Eliot’s mind opened up and swallowed him whole.)

When Hardison finally blinked back into awareness, Parker was behind him, petting his hair in quick little brushes. Eliot was pulling away from him.

“Do you guys feel better now?” Parker asked.

“You better believe it.” Hardison felt ready to hack the Pentagon again. Eliot was bright and happy beside him.

“Good.”

 

 

* * * *

 

It really was Eliot’s fault.

Hardison was the empath, but he was clueless. Parker was less naive, but she wasn’t an empath. Out of the three of them, Eliot was the one who knew what was happening.

He had been in Trent’s house, working the plan, and all he had been able to think about was how empty he felt.

 _Addict_ , Moreau’s voice said, over and over.

Eliot could feel himself slipping into old patterns—all his emotions fading out unless Hardison was there to give them color, the need growing with every reading they did.

It wasn’t ideal, but it was something he was willing to live with to make Hardison feel good. Eliot had wanted him and Parker in one way or another since he’d caught them in his rifle sights. This was just making subtext into text.

What they were doing wouldn’t hurt Hardison. If something happened to Eliot and the readings stopped, all it would take was a few days of twitchiness and Hardison would be fine.

“Eliot!”

He stopped drifting and paid attention.

Parker roamed around the room, power forced into a space too small. She was looking at him expectantly. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting on his end of the couch, staring into space.

“What?” he asked.

“I asked you what you thought.”

“You know I never listen to you, Parker.”

“Yes, you do.” Parker said.

“Yes, he does,” Hardison confirmed. “Like anybody with sense in their head. Eliot, while you were off in la-la land, our fearless leader was asking was what thing we should threaten to take away from Trent.”

“I vote for his lawnmower,” Parker said. “Did you see that grass? Pretty short if you ask me.”

“Right,” Hardison said slowly. “Um, how about his whole house instead?”

Parker pointed at him. “Good.”

“That’s not what he cares about,” Eliot said.

“Were you not there when he was jawing on about his cabinets for ten minutes?”

“It’s not about the things,” Eliot said. “It’s the respect the things get him. Threaten him with something that will make his cop buddies drop him and he’s on the hook. We’ve got lots of pictures of the guy already, so we use those to forge a scandal that would damage his standing in the community. He’ll give us whatever we want. Including Randy.”

Hardison and Parker were looking at him in a way that made him uncomfortably warm. “What?” he snapped.

“Told you Eliot knows stuff,” Parker said.

“Babe, I never disagreed with you.”

Their praise made him want to storm out of the room. It made him want to curl up at their feet. It made him _want._

Eliot’s head started to ache.

“Whatever.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know what kind of scandal will scare away friends like Trent’s, but there’s got to be something.”

“Oh, I know.” Hardison’s delight promised a lot of hurt heading Randal Trent’s way.

“Great, then do that.” The sun streaming through the windows was stabbing Eliot’s headache right through his eyes.

Hardison was rummaging in his bag of tech, muttering excitedly to himself.

Parker came over and stood in front of Eliot, blocking the sun. “Is there something wrong with you?”

“No.”

“Your face got all scrunched.”

Hardison ran upstairs to one of the bedrooms. He shouted down to them. “I need a sexy shirt! Eliot where are all your shirts without sleeves? Oh, wait, never mind! I found your duffle bag, I’m good!”

“What is he doing?” Eliot asked, bewildered.

“Who knows?” Parker kicked his foot. “Why is your face scrunched?”

She wasn’t going to stop until she found something she could fix. He was glad she cared, but he also wasn’t about to tell her that he had an empath headache. It would settle out eventually, once his brain got used to a new normal.

“Just tired, I guess.”

That part was true. It had taken hours to calm down after the emotions Hardison had pushed on him last night. By the time he’d been able to stop pacing, it was too close to dawn to be worth it.

He didn’t think Hardison had even been aware he was pushing anything. It was fine. An easy mistake to make in the heat of the moment.

“Take a nap,” Parker said immediately. He had been right—she was happy to think she was helping.

“It’s not even noon.”

“So?” Parker waved her hand, and an invisible force grabbed Eliot and pushed him flat on the couch.

“Parker!”

She was looking very proud of herself. “Sleep.”

Eliot strained to lift his head off the cushions. He managed a few inches before Parker’s powers pushed him down again. “I will never make you brownies again.”

Parker brushed off his threat. “Go to sleep.”

“I can’t sleep with you staring at me.” Eliot couldn’t make himself relax into her control. Every muscle was pushing against her.

He usually liked that Parker was strong enough to hold him—he’d liked it last night in the kitchen.

But last night he hadn’t been lying on his back, pinned. His head hadn’t hurt with echoes of an empath.  

Eliot’s heart was beating very, very fast.

This was reminding him of Belgrade, and he had to take a deep, slow breath to remind himself that it was just Parker. It was just fun.

Hardison’s voice shouted down again. “Come on, guys! I need the camera!”

“Coming!” Parker shouted back. Concentration broken, her powers snapped their hold on Eliot’s body. He jerked to his feet.

Parker was collecting the camera equipment. “If you don’t want to sleep, come help take pictures,” she offered.

Parker and Hardison weren’t perfect. They made mistakes.

And if neither time had been a mistake, well. Eliot hadn’t signed up to deny them something they wanted.

 

 

The day passed with Hardison’s little photoshoot and lots of editing on the computer. By the evening, they were gathered around the kitchen table, examining their work.

“That is just wrong,” Eliot said.

“Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Hardison looked absurdly pleased.

“Ick.” Parker snapped the laptop closed. “We’re going to have to burn that computer after we’re done.”

Hardison put his hand over his heart. “I am wounded. My pride is hurt. That was art, people!”

“We could run it over with the car,” Parker said. 

Parker’s voice was so loud and so close. By this point, Eliot’s headache was a steady throb. “Or a cement truck.”

“Y’all going to give me a complex. I looked great in that shirt.”

“It was my shirt,” Eliot pointed out. “And your freakishly long arms probably stretched it out.”

“It was a tank top, Eliot! It doesn’t have sleeves. How can my arms stretch out something that don’t exist?”

“You’d find a way.”

“You all will be hailing my genius tomorrow when Randal Trent won’t lift a finger to stop us.”

“Wow, Hardison, you’re _so smart_ to think of this plan with no help from either of us.”

“Rude,” Hardison muttered. “Plain and simple rudeness is what it is.”

The bickering helped distract Eliot from his head. Cooking would distract him more. He moved away from them, toward the kitchen. “How’s pad thai sound for dinner?”

“We still have chicken left,” Parker said. “Unless Hardison ate it.”

“When did I have time to eat chicken? She’s right, man, we’ll throw it in the microwave or something. Let’s just chill.”

So it was going to be that kind of night. Okay. It had been hours since their last reading, after all.

“You’re lucky you two didn’t die of malnutrition before you met me,” Eliot said. Even his own voice scraped against his headache.

Hardison stood up and stretched. “How did we ever stay alive without your hovering disapproval?”

“Trent mentioned going out on Sunday afternoons to watch football,” Parker said. “We’ll talk to Randy tomorrow, and drop the bomb on his dad once we’ve gotten him away.”

“So we’re done for the day?” Hardison asked, hopefully.

 “Yep.” Parker jumped up from her chair. “Skydiving?”

“Mario Kart?”

“Movie,” Parker said, compromising.

Eliot didn’t think he could handle sitting through hours of fake action knowing that a reading was coming later. Waiting was always the worst part.

He made his tone belligerent. “You always pick watching a movie. I’ve seen more movies in the past few weeks than I’ve seen in the last five years.”

“Well, what do you want to do?” Hardison said, like Eliot had hoped he would.

Eliot made eye contact with Parker, and whatever she saw in his face made her understand. Parker always knew. “Yeah,” she said. “Go ahead.”

Hardison said, “What? You have big plans tonight or—ack!”

Eliot moved with all the speed he possessed. He had Hardison on the couch before the man had even finished screeching.

Eliot wrapped his hands around both Hardison’s wrists. “Come on.”

“Man, if you wanted to do this earlier, you could have said. Use your words.”

Eliot was tired, and his head hurt, and he wanted this over. He made everything inside himself open and inviting. “Hardison, come on.”

“Woah, slow down.” Hardison tugged his wrists out of Eliot’s hands and Eliot had to stop a groan from making it out of his mouth. “Are you okay?”

“ _Yes_.”

Hardison was looking at him with so much—so _much_ that Eliot didn’t know what else to do other than open his mind even more.

“Don’t try to distract me. Something’s got you wound tight,” Hardison said.

You, Eliot wanted to say. Both of you, and don’t you dare take it away.

“My brain is just getting used to all this again,” Eliot said, giving him a version of the truth.

“Is that why your face was all hurt today?” Parker asked.

Traitor. “For the last time, I’m fine. But you two won’t be in a second if you keep asking me stupid questions.”

Parker was satisfied. “Okay.”

Hardison looked less sure. “Maybe the readings are making it worse.”

Eliot didn’t want to lie to Hardison, but he would, if it meant he could keep helping him. “They’re not. I’m telling you, it’s normal. It’ll go away.”

“Alright,” Hardison said, giving in like Eliot had known he would—he was making his mind _very_ inviting. “But let me do this one.”

Technically, Hardison did every reading, but Eliot knew what he meant. Until now, Eliot had been the driving force, deciding how fast, the tone, the position. That control had been nice. It had damped the panic.

Eliot said, “Sure.”

Hardison studied him, intent, like he was a piece of tech to tease apart. Parker rested her chin on the back of the couch and watched.

There were so many ways Hardison could want to do this.

…and only a handful of ways he _would_ , Eliot reminded himself.

This was Hardison, who he’d seen get teary watching a video of a baby panda. Hardison was different. He made what they were doing into a good thing.

By iron self-control, Eliot didn’t flinch when Hardison turned his hands up, palms vulnerable and exposed. He’d finally taken off the bandage, and the cuts on his left hand were barely scabbed over. Hardison avoided them carefully. He ran his smooth fingers down the length of Eliot’s palms.

If Hardison been holding a knife, Eliot’s hands would have been ruined.

“You’re okay,” Hardison said. “Relax.”

That order was not a good one. It had a history behind it, weighing down the word heavily enough to crush him.

“Woah.” Hardison took Eliot’s wrists. He was in Eliot’s mind, so lightly Eliot hadn’t even noticed at first. “Easy.”

Hardison was not Moreau.

This was fine.

 

 

 

The rest of the night passed in a haze. Eliot didn’t try to keep track of what was happening, because that always made things worse. Instead, he squeezed up small inside his own head and let Hardison take up residence. Whenever Parker nudged his body, he moved for her.

Someone gave him chicken and he ate it.

At one point, he slipped off the couch to make room for Parker. He sat on the floor, resting his head back against the cushions.

“Are you good?” Hardison asked, twice.

“Yes,” Eliot said, twice.

When the fog rolled back, the first thing Eliot was aware of was pressure all around him. Hardison was asleep on the couch, his hand resting on Eliot’s shoulder. Parker was lying opposite to Hardison, feet tucked behind his back. She had her whole arm around Eliot, so his throat rested in the crook of her elbow.

Eliot couldn’t move.

There were still empath powers lingering in Eliot’s head. The presence twisted slowly, reacting to Eliot’s emotions.

The hands on him were terrible anchors, because hands always were when empaths were inside his head. Moreau would raise hell if Eliot made a big deal about it, and honestly, the repercussions of that weren’t worth it. But he also wasn’t supposed to be sitting passively while Moreau was using him to relax. Why was Eliot just sitting there? He needed to—

“Hey,” Hardison murmured, his voice thick with sleep.

Damn it all to hell and back.

Moreau wasn’t here. It was just Hardison and Parker. Eliot needed to calm down. He needed to remember where he was before he did something he couldn’t take back.

What was _wrong_ with him?

Hardison rubbed Eliot’s shoulder clumsily. His eyes were still closed. “Nightmare?”

Eliot couldn’t feel his limbs. He assumed they were still there.

“’s’okay,” Hardison soothed. His voice was drifting back towards sleep.

Suddenly, like slamming a car into neutral on the highway, Eliot’s panic was gone.

His gears ground together, snarling and shrieking.

He bit hard down on his tongue until the taste of blood and the pain let him take a breath. One.

He took another. Two.

Three.

Four.

 

 

* * * *

 

Parker woke up when Eliot pulled away from her. Grey light was coming through the windows. Eliot was still on the floor, but he was turned towards both of them now. Parker only kept her eyes open a tiny bit, so she could spy on him.

Eliot looked weird. He looked like he wasn’t seeing them, even though he was looking right at them.

Slowly, he put his hand on Hardison’s chest and trailed it down. It looked different than how Eliot usually touched Hardison, in a way she couldn’t quite give words to. That, coupled with the blank look in Eliot’s eyes, jolted Parker into a memory she did not want to have. All the sudden, she could feel the cold railings of the metal bunkbeds in the holding centers.

Not good.

“Eliot?” she whispered.

He stopped, blinking at her. Parker lifted her head off the couch to look at him.

“What are you doing?”

He stared down at his hand, at Hardison’s sleeping face. He shook his head slowly, like he didn’t know the answer to her question.

Parker sat up, feeling like she’d just missed a step on the stairs and her powers hadn’t caught her. Eliot was weird a lot, but she’d never seen him like this. “Let’s go for a run.”

She preferred climbing, but Eliot liked to run, and he was the one looking at his hand like he wasn’t sure it belonged to him.

She got up and he followed her, shaking his head hard.

“Thanks,” he said, his voice rusty.

Parker wasn’t entirely sure what he was thanking her for, but she said, “You’re welcome.”

 

 

 

Running with Eliot meant actual running. And Eliot ran fast.

Parker sprinted behind him in the pre-dawn darkness. Neither of them knew this neighborhood, so it didn’t matter where they went.

Eventually, Eliot slowed just a fraction, so they weren’t running flat out, just running like they were trying to get away. The bad memory was getting pounded out of her head with every block, so Parker decided to move up alongside Eliot instead of staying behind him.

He glanced over at her when she matched his pace. He didn’t look sorry to see her.

They ran together for a while, while the sky got lighter around them. Eventually, Parker got bored—running really wasn’t her idea of a good time. She reached out and whacked Eliot on the shoulder before pulling ahead of him.

She looked back over her shoulder and grinned. Eliot gave her his You Are Weird face.

Parker dropped back and smacked him again, running ahead a little slower this time, to let him think she would be easy to catch.

He swiped at her elbow just as she snatched it away from him. Parker put on a little more speed, and so did he, and then the game really started.

Parker dodged around a streetlight but lost some time to a tipped-over trashcan. In the time it took to jump it, Eliot had caught up and got her, a quick touch on the middle of her back.

Parker turned on her heel, hoping he’d still be in reach, but Eliot was too smart for that. He was already running the way they had come, only he was running backwards.

Showoff.

They zigzagged their way home like that, trading light taps back and forth. By the time they got to their street, Eliot looked normal again. That is, he looked like he was trying to hide that he was having fun, which was normal for Eliot.

Parker slowed down to a walk and Eliot settled into her pace beside her. He tapped the top of her shoulder.

She poked his side.

“You know this isn’t how you play tag.”

“What’s tag?” Parker hadn’t brought a key to the townhouse with her, so she picked the lock, easy and fast.

The house was silent, which meant Hardison wasn’t awake yet.

“Never mind,” Eliot said, lowering his voice.

They walked quietly up the stairs, their feet not making any noise on the carpet. Sure enough, Hardison was still on the couch, asleep. He’d sprawled out in their absence, and Parker was pretty sure he was drooling.

“He’s cute. Is that right?” Parker had suspected this for a while, but she’d never had anyone else to verify it. “Like a puppy or something. People say those are cute.”

Eliot made a face. “Ugh, Parker, how would I know?”

“Because you notice Hardison.”

“ _You_ notice Hardison.”

“Uh huh,” Parker agreed. “So am I right? Cute?”

Hardison chose that moment to flop over on his stomach and bury his face deeper into his pillow. He sighed a sleepy sigh.

Parker gave Eliot a Look.

“Maybe,” Eliot said grudgingly.

His face wasn’t grumpy at all, though. He was looking at Hardison with warmth—nothing like that creepy blankness of earlier.

It made Parker feel safer, watching Eliot look at Hardison like that.

“Let’s shower,” she said, pushing him up the steps.

He let her propel him up the second flight of stairs. “For the last time, shower relay races are not a thing.”

“People take showers together. I’ve seen it on TV.”

“They ain’t doing relays, I’ll tell you that much.”

“But it would be so cool!”

“Not a thing, Parker.”

 

 

Eliot let her have the shower first. She was fast at showering, because standing under a spray of water tugged her thoughts back to the holding centers, and she’d already been there enough today. Normally she could shut the memories up behind the door in her head, but it had been a bad morning for memories.

Relays would have made it better, no matter what Eliot said.

Eliot was fast too. By the time she had tugged on her clothes in the bedroom, the water was off in the bathroom.

She knocked on the door. “I want to brush my teeth.”

“Parker, I’m still in here.”

“They’re going to turn yellow and fall out.”

He opened the door, already dressed. “That’s disgusting.”

The bathroom wasn’t steamy or warm like after Hardison’s showers. She bet Eliot did what she did—cold water and fast scrubbing. It made her smile at him.

He got back to doing whatever he was doing to his hair. He was holding some sort of mysterious tool.

“What is that?”

He checked to be sure she wasn’t making fun of him before he said, “Haven’t you ever seen a hair straightener before?”

Parker watched, fascinated. “It looks like it could melt your face off. I like it.”

Eliot had a way of doing physical things that turned the space around him calm. She’d noticed it when they were training, but it applied to other things too: driving, chopping up vegetables, running. And now this. It was helping her breathe better.

“How did you learn how to do that?” she asked, when he was almost done.

“Dated a hair stylist.”

His hair really did look nice. “Maybe I should date one of those.”

Eliot’s mouth quirked up in a smile.

“Why do you do it?”

“Because I want to.” He set the ironing machine down on the counter and put in a tiny braid, right behind his ear. “Reminds me that things are different than before.”

The shower had shivered away some of the calm she’d gotten from running. The metal bunkbeds were still in the back of her mind, waiting for her.

“Do it to me too,” she said. Eliot looked like he was going to refuse, so she talked quickly. “Different is good. Right now, I need different.”

He relented. Eliot always did. “You have to hold still so I don’t burn you.”

“You won’t.”

His tool was a lot scarier when it was heated up a few centimeters away from her face. Still, she wasn’t worried. The idea that Eliot would fumble was just as impossible as thinking he would have let their car crash.

She couldn’t imagine a situation where he couldn’t keep them safe.

“Did you guys start a slumber party without me?”

Neither she nor Eliot startled at Hardison’s voice—they’d both heard him coming.

“Eliot’s making my hair different,” Parker said proudly.

“Nice, babe.” Hardison wandered in and stood behind them so they could all see each other in the mirror. “Eliot, look at you go. Like that guy on that makeover show.”

“Shut up,” Eliot said, easily.

Hardison grinned at him in the mirror. “I can see it. You’d be a fan favorite.”

“I want a braid,” Parker said. “A little one to match Eliot.”

“For the love of—no, Parker, that’s weird.” Eliot’s hands moved carefully through her hair.

“I’ll give you a braid,” Hardison offered.

“Ha.” She stuck her tongue out in the mirror so Eliot could see it.

Hardison came around to her other side, squeezing carefully past Eliot so he didn’t bump him. “Did you tell Eliot that I am the braiding master?”

“Must have slipped her mind,” Eliot said.

“Well, I am. All the little foster sisters I had running around? It was learn or die.” His fingers were in her hair too, smooth and gentle.

Hardison and Eliot would _never_ pull her hair, because that was on her Always Bad list.

Pressed tightly between them, watching them both in the mirror, Parker felt the memory of the holding centers slip away for now.

 

 

Parker felt dressed for war. Like Hardison and Eliot had given her armor instead of a different hairstyle.

When she knocked on Randy’s door, them at her back, she sort of wished Randal Trent was home. They could take him apart.

But they had been careful. Only Randy in the house.

When he opened the door, Randy had a new bruise on his cheek, right under his eye.

Parker just stared at him, her words drying up at the sight.

“Hi,” Randy said.

“Hi.”

Randy waited. He didn’t seem to care that they were a bunch of adults who might be there to hurt him. He looked nervous, but he wasn’t doing anything about that nervousness.

Parker knew that feeling of helplessness.

This really was a bad morning for memories.

“You’re Randy,” she said. It came out more aggressive than she meant.

“How do you know that?” Randy asked, slowly. He was looking actually scared now. “I didn’t do anything wrong, I promise.”

Parker wanted to help these kids. She did. But Randy was so small—he had tiny little fingers and a tiny little nose—and all she could think about was how she needed to grab him and run.

Eliot moved her aside gently and crouched down on the porch to be eye-level with Randy. “Hey, little man. I’m Eliot. You’re not in any trouble.”

Parker realized that she had backed up hard against Hardison. He had an arm around her waist.

“Why do you know my name?” Randy asked. His eyes were huge in his hurt face.

Eliot had his hands out in plain sight, and he was holding his body comfortingly relaxed. “Me and my friends, we thought you might be in some trouble. So we came to check.”

“I’m okay,” Randy said immediately.

“We’re not cops.” Eliot was making his voice calm and careful. Everything about him was careful. “Your dad doesn’t know us. We’re just here to make you feel less scared.”

Randy looked at all of them cautiously. Parker didn’t feel any tapping in her brain that meant he was using any powers.

Eliot was watching him as Randy watched them. “Believing us is scary. Because if I’m lying or if I can’t deliver, everything is going to feel a little worse when we’re gone. I know, I’ve been there.”

Yes. Yes, Parker remembered feeling exactly that way about Archie when he’d first found her. He hadn’t seemed to notice how terrified she was.

Eliot would have made her feel a lot safer.

“What do you do when you feel like that?” Randy asked. Even his voice was little.

Eliot gave him a smile that was kind of sad. “You make a choice. You choose people to trust and you keep trusting them, no matter what. I suggest you choose the people who hurt you the least.”

“Or, just a thought, how about the ones who don’t hurt you at all,” Hardison said.

Eliot ignored him. “If you’re looking at numbers, Randy, none of us have ever hit you.”

“And we won’t,” Parker said. This time the aggression in her voice was a good fit.

Randy scrubbed at his eyes with the hand that wasn’t in the cast. “What if I picked to believe you?”

“Then I’d ask you if there was a place in your house where you wanted to go and talk,” Eliot said. “A place you felt real safe?”

Randy shook his head. Hardison’s grip tightened around Parker.

“How about outside?” Eliot said, not looking upset at all. “Because you could take us there, and maybe it would be easier to talk about how you’re doing.”

Randy stepped out onto the porch and closed the door behind him. “Okay.”

 

* * * *

 

 

Randy took them to the park where Hardison and Parker had first seen him. There was a jungle gym there with one of those plastic castles at the top. It was a tight fit, but they all managed to squeeze inside. Hardison positioned himself by the slide. Parker stretched her legs across the entrance, looking ready to punt any invaders off the side.

Eliot sat next to Randy—not too close, but not far away, either.

Even without trying to read him, Hardison was pretty sure Randy couldn’t be an empath. There was no way he’d be able to ignore the swirling mess that was Eliot’s head right now: anger, grief, determination, protectiveness. Eliot was rocking the whole spectrum.

Kids tied all three of them in knots, but Eliot and Parker especially.

But to be fair to Randy, Eliot’s emotions had been all over the place today. Hardison vaguely remembered waking up to Eliot having a nightmare, so maybe that’s why. Nightmares sucked.

Parker was telling Randy their plan to steal him. She didn’t go into detail about how they planned to stop Trent from following, just assured Randy he wouldn’t.

Randy was loosening up the longer Parker talked. But he addressed his question to Eliot. “Could you take me to my mom instead? She’s been trying to come get me for a long time, but my dad won’t let her.”

“Hardison?” Parker ordered.

Hardison had dug this up in his research. “Yeah. Lori Quick. She’s filled multiple pleas for custody, all denied because she was found to be an unfit guardian.”

“ _Hardison_ ,” Eliot snapped.

Oops. “No offense,” he added, to Randy.

“She isn’t,” Randy protested. “My dad said all these things about her that weren’t true in the hearings. He made me say stuff too. She’s probably really mad at me. She probably doesn’t even want me.”

“That’s not how moms work,” Eliot said. There was a confidence in his emotions that made Hardison wonder.

“She lives a couple towns away,” Hardison said. “We could check her out.”

Eliot nodded. Parker said, “Let’s do it.”

Randy was opening up, light building inside him. “Really?”

“You bet,” Eliot said.

Randy’s smile was the sweetest thing Hardison had seen in days.

“One more thing,” Parker said. “What kind of psychic are you?”

Randy’s smile snapped off, like flicking a switch.

“It’s okay,” Parker assured him. She held out her hand, and Hardison’s phone wiggled out his pocket and flew into her hand. “See?”

“Cool,” Randy breathed.

“Empath.” Hardison raised his hand.

“Yeah, I’m not psychic,” Eliot said when Randy turned to him.

“He’s special in other ways,” Hardison said, giving Eliot a grin.

Something sour flitted across Hardison’s mind. Oh, right. Eliot probably didn’t want a kid knowing he could kill people with his pinky finger. Hardison grimaced an apology at him.

“So what about you?” Parker asked. “Can you move stuff without touching it?”

“No.” Randy sounded disappointed.

“Then do you know what people are feeling or thinking?”

“I’m not sure,” Randy said. “Sometimes I know when my dad is going to—you know—before he gets out of the car.”

“Could be either,” Hardison said, when Parker looked at him questioningly.

“Here,” Parker said, getting into her puzzle-solving mode. “Try to do it on me.”

She flung herself flat on her back, so she could smile up into Randy’s face. The kid looked startled, but smiled tentatively back at her.

“I don’t know how.”

Hardison thought about how to explain it. “Just look at Parker and ask yourself something about her, something you’d like to know.”

Parker wiggled her eyebrows and Randy’s smile got bigger.

“It’s not bad?” he asked.

“Not if you have permission,” Hardison said. Never too soon to start teaching kids about psychic etiquette. “Never without permission. Never ever, you got that?”

Again, that weird, off-kilter discord from Eliot. Hardison frowned at him.

“I got it.” Randy squinted his eyes at Parker. She squinted back.

“There’s something,” she said, sitting up. “I can’t tell what, it’s too quiet. Randy, try on Hardison.”

“Just ask yourself a question,” Hardison reminded him, scooting a little closer.

Hardison could feel something, very faint. “Definitely some kind of telepath,” he said. “Empaths can’t read each other, and you were sort of reading me, right? What did it feel like?”

“Sugary,” Randy said. He looked suffused with wonder.

Parker giggled.

“Oh, sure, laugh all you like,” Hardison said. “I know you wish you had a sugar brain too.”

“I didn’t know I could do that.” Randy’s smile was back at full-force now.

Parker clapped her hands. “Try on Eliot!”

Eliot turned his head sharply to stare at her. His emotions flared in a burst of fire before tamping down again.

Hardison said, “Um, Parker, I don’t think—”

“It’s fine,” Eliot said, already moving forward.

Eliot wasn’t okay with this. Hardison could feel it. “Eliot, wait. Parker!”

“What?”

Hardison didn’t want to throw Eliot’s list in a stranger’s face. But this was uncomfortably close to Sharing, and he knew Eliot was making that connection, even though Parker wasn’t.

“It’s _fine_ ,” Eliot insisted.

It clearly wasn’t.

“No,” Hardison said. He summoned a smile for Randy. “Sorry dude, Eliot doesn’t like it when people read him.”

The words came out so thoughtlessly and so quickly, Hardison knew they were true.

(But—)

A flicker of relief licked through Eliot’s thoughts.

(But, wait—)

“It’s okay,” Randy said quickly. “I don’t like it when people tickle me.”

“Me neither,” Parker agreed.

Hardison was too busy trying to process what had just happened to listen to them.

Eliot had said he was fine, but he hadn’t been. He’d lied.

Eliot had been telling Hardison that he was fine a _lot_ over the past few days.

“Hey.” Eliot snapped his fingers under Hardison’s nose. He was pissed. “We’re going.”

Hardison followed them to the car and gave them Lori’s address, his thoughts running at a million miles per second.

He sat in the back, letting Parker and Randy jam into the front.

Eliot said, “I don’t want that kid up here without a seatbelt. I’ve told you, it ain’t safe.”

Parker said, “I’ll hold onto him. Just drive.”

Eliot drove.

Hardison felt like someone had wiped away fog on a pair of glasses.

(No, it couldn’t be what he was thinking. Because that meant—)

Data. Hardison needed more data. The only way to get data was to experiment. But they were still in the middle of a job—they had Randy in their car.

He couldn’t just sit here. Job or no job, he needed to start gathering information.

(It was probably all fine.)

“Hey Eliot,” he said, hoping his voice sounded normal. “Turn on my music.”

“Your iPod only has that electronic stuff,” Eliot said, like Hardison had known he would. He spoke in a confidential tone to Randy to make him smile. “Hardison has horrible taste. I’d rather cut off my own ears.”

And then, Eliot turned on Hardison’s music.

It didn’t have to mean anything.

(Not if Hardison didn’t want it to.)

 

 

The rest of the job flew by. Hardison got himself together to research Lori Quick more thoroughly. Randy had been right, she seemed like a good person, no red flags anywhere. She’d binge-watched _Avatar: The Last Airbender_ the month before.

She was certainly delighted to see her son. Hardison hung back to see what he could pick up in her emotions. Any sign of ill-intent or hostility and he was taking Randy to Nanna’s.

But Lori was devastatingly grateful. She was scared too, and furious when she saw Randy’s arm and bruises. But that was a good sign.

Hardison let Eliot and Parker accept the thanks and explain that Lori didn’t have anything to worry about. He couldn’t concentrate.

It’s not that he didn’t care about Randy, obviously he did. It’s just, he cared about Eliot more.

And if he was right, then that meant—

“What is up with you?” Eliot demanded, halfway through their drive back to Randal Trent’s house.

“Nothing,” Hardison said.

“Why aren’t you gloating with us?” Parker said. She twisted in her seat and put a hand on his forehead. “Are you sick?”

“I’m gloating on the inside,” Hardison said.

Actually, he was slowly dying on the inside, but whatever. Semantics.

“Come on,” Eliot said, disbelief pouring out of him. “There is something going on in that head of yours. What is it?”

“Eliot,” Hardison said. “Hush.”

Eliot didn’t open his mouth for the rest of the drive, except when Parker asked him a question.

Nausea was growing in Hardison’s stomach.

The next piece was supposed to be the funny part.

Yesterday, it had seemed hilarious to blackmail Trent with Photoshopped pictures of his black gay lover. Hardison had been so excited to show Trent the pictures. He’d especially liked the one with them on the golf course.

Now Hardison just wanted it over. He had to talk to Eliot. He had to—do _something_.

“I don’t care, one of you do it,” he said, when Parker waved the envelope of pictures enticingly at him.

Parker and Eliot shared a glance.

So Parker ended up being the one to explain the terms of Randal Trent terminating his parental rights. The only thing Hardison did was produce the forms for him to sign.

Eliot felt like he wanted to kill the guy. Especially when Trent tried to take a swing at Hardison.

Hardison said, “Let him go, Eliot,” and Eliot did exactly that.

On the way out of the Trent’s house, Hardison decided to push his experiment a bit farther.

“I want to drive,” he said, stopping Eliot with a hand on his arm.

“Good for you,” Eliot growled.

Hardison’s heart lifted with hope. But, in the name of science, he persevered. “Come on, let me.”

“Since when do you care about driving?”

“Since now.”

Eliot didn’t want to let him. Hardison could feel it. Eliot had to know that Hardison could feel it.

Eliot surrendered the keys. “You grind the gears and I’ll break your nose,” he said.

Hardison drove back to the townhouse, trying to keep his face impassive.

Eliot snatched the keys out of his hand as soon as they parked. He stormed into the townhouse without another word.

Parker glared at Hardison. “Why are you being so mean?”

Hardison let his mask slip, so she could see how upset he was. Parker crowded close to him immediately. “Hardison? What’s wrong?”

He rested his head against hers.

“Hardison?”

“When we go inside, I need you to back my play,” Hardison said.

“On Eliot? Why do you need to run a play on Eliot?”

“I think we—I—” Hardison couldn’t even get the words out. He couldn’t even think the words to himself yet.

“Hardison, you’re scaring me.”

“I know. I’m sorry. Just, just back me up. Even if it looks like I’m going to do something bad, I promise I won’t.”

Parker was getting upset enough for Hardison to catch a taste of it. “I know you won’t. What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know,” Hardison said. His voice was wobbly. “Parker, I just don’t _know_. I’m praying that I’m wrong, but I have to be sure.”

Parker was running her hands all over him, like she was checking for wounds. “You’re okay. It’s all okay.”

“I hope so.” Hardison pulled away from her and took a deep breath. “Come on.”

Eliot was slapping sandwiches together with bad-temper. “You two stop for a show on your way in?”

Hardison had grifted Damien Moreau. He could grift Eliot.

“Sorry, man. I just feel off. My head hurts.”

Eliot frowned at him. “That so?”

Hardison rubbed his head and winced. “Yeah. It’s like my powers are restless or something.”

Parker was doing a good job of not paying them much attention. She was grifting too.

Eliot left the sandwiches and closed in on Hardison. “You know I can help you with that. You don’t have to put up with a headache, Hardison.”

Eliot’s anger was completely gone, leaving only concern.

(See? Hardison wasn’t—)

“I felt bad asking,” Hardison said.

Eliot closed his fingers around Hardison’s wrists right there in the kitchen, not even bothering to sit down. “Why?”

Eliot’s mind opened to him, a siren song. Hardison pulled up his shields a little so that he could actually concentrate.

“I told you, my powers are restless. Like, all bottled up.”

As far as Hardison knew, empath powers didn’t work that way. But he was hoping Eliot didn’t know that.

“So set them loose. It’s fine.”

Hardison almost dropped the whole thing. Because Eliot was holding his gaze with such steady reassurance, so much _want_ in his emotions, that what they were doing had to be okay.

But he couldn’t let it drop, because it was _Eliot._ Eliot who had exhaustion scratched into every line of him, now that Hardison was actually looking for it. Eliot who was making them goddamn sandwiches.

“Can I push something on you?” Hardison asked.

Eliot’s grip loosened.

 _That’s good, that’s right,_ Hardison thought, hope growing again.

Eliot looked to Parker, and so did Hardison.

Her cheeks were bright pink. Her eyes were shiny. But she did what she’d promised and backed Hardison’s play. “If Hardison wants to.”

 _Say no_. Hardison was pretty sure every telepath in a hundred mile radius was picking up his thoughts.

Eliot certainly wasn’t.

He looked neutral, as if what Hardison had suggested wasn’t completely horrifying. Inside, his emotions were tinged with hurt—but the _want_ was still predominant.

His hands tightened again around Hardison’s wrists. “Okay. Here.” He tugged Hardison out of the kitchen and put his back to the wall, an exact copy of their reading with Moreau.

“You’re okay with this?” Hardison asked, because apparently he just wanted more and more rope to hang himself.

“Sure,” Eliot said, settling his shoulders back. He smiled at Hardison. “Come on.”

Hardison was going to be sick right here.

He stepped in close, for one final test. Because he needed to know—needed to be sure how deep this went.

Hardison raised his hand towards Eliot’s face, telegraphing every move and giving Eliot enough time to stop it. Eliot just waited.

Maybe he was trying to call Hardison’s bluff. Maybe he’d seen right through this grift from the beginning.

Hardison had to know.

He pressed his hand lightly against Eliot’s cheek.

Eliot shivered. And then he held very still.

“Sweet Jesus,” Hardison whispered.

He ripped himself away from Eliot, scrambling to get as far away as possible. The room wasn’t big enough. Probably the whole country wasn’t big enough.

Parker was backing away too, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. She looked slapped, stricken.

She looked how Hardison felt.

Eliot was just confused. “Hardison? What the hell?”

Hardison was shaking. He felt trapped in an earthquake. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

Eliot looked like Hardison was speaking an unfamiliar language. “I said it was fine.”

“It’s not fine!” Hardison’s voice rose suddenly into a shout. “Pushing is bad! We all know that. We all agreed.”

“You were the one who suggested it! If you didn’t want to do it—”

“You let me touch your face. Touching your face is on the Always Bad list!”

“I never asked you to make that list. What the hell is this about?”

Hardison was having trouble breathing. “You never tell us no.”

Parker took in a big gulp of air, like she was trying to help Hardison breathe.

“I tell you no all the time,” Eliot said. He was doing that thing where he checked out the exits. Even without the emotions coming off him, Hardison would have known he was nervous.

“You tell me no,” Parker said, her voice small. “And I ask you again and you tell me yes.”

Eliot looked completely off balance. “So you want me to tell you no more often? Okay, I guess. I mean, I can do that if you really want me to.”

“It’s not about what we want,” Hardison said, flapping his hands. “It’s about what _you_ want—and don’t want, for heaven’s sake, that’s the critical issue here. Can you just forget about what we might possibly want for a second?”

“No,” Eliot said flatly. He raised his eyebrows. “There. Happy?”

“Of course I’m not happy! Eliot, how much of what we’ve been doing the past few days have you actually wanted to do?”

“All of it,” Eliot said promptly. “Except for this conversation, which I’ll admit I’m really not enjoying. So if we could move things along…”

“Why are you using your grifter voice?” Parker was more focused than Hardison had ever seen her. She looked like she wanted to break Eliot open and read what was inside.

Eliot eyes shifted between them. Hardison knew that look: this was Eliot Spencer cataloguing threats, making a plan, deciding on the mode of attack.

 “You said you wanted to do the readings.” Hardison paused and thought back, seeing everything in a new light. “No,” he said slowly. “You didn’t. You just showed me _want_. You didn’t specify what you actually wanted. Oh my god.” Hardison kept wiping his hands on his jeans. He couldn’t seem to stop. He couldn’t breathe. “Eliot. Oh my _god_.”

How had Hardison not noticed before?

(He had noticed. He’d just shoved it deep down.)

“Calm down,” Eliot ordered, distressed. “Hardison, you’re going to pass out.”

Everything was starting to feel a little fuzzy, but the pieces wouldn’t stop falling into place. “You panicked last night because I was in your head, not because you had a nightmare. I knew you felt off, I said you felt tense. Man, I asked you and asked you.” Hardison’s breath was coming in shallow, desperate gasps. He couldn’t get enough air. “I’ve been hurting you. I’ve been—just like—”

“ _You’ve gotten a taste for him_ ,” Moreau had said. And Hardison had, like Eliot was something for him to enjoy.

(Like Eliot was some _thing_.)

“Parker, calm him down!”

Parker’s cool hands pulled him down to the floor. “Hardison, breathe with me. Nice and easy, come on, you can do it.”

Hardison concentrated on the slow slip of a tear down Parker’s cheek and breathed when she told him to breathe.

“I didn’t know,” he told her, as soon as he could speak again.

Parker nodded. She believed him.

Hardison wasn’t sure if she should.

Eliot was on the floor too, straining towards Hardison but not letting himself get too close. Worry and fear exploded out of him. “Hardison.” Eliot’s voice was deadly. “What do you need?”

Hardison took a few more breaths. “I need you to tell me what you want.”

“You know,” Eliot said, desperately.

“Tell us,” Parker demanded. “With words.”

Eliot’s answer sounded choked out of him. “I want to do whatever you want me to do.”

“Anything we want,” Hardison said.

“Yes.”

“No matter how it makes you feel.”

“Dammit Hardison, _yes_!”

“Okay,” Hardison said. He stood shakily to his feet. “Well. I think we’ve learned a lot today. I’m gonna…”

He pushed past Parker’s helpful hands and headed for the stairs. When he finally made it to the top, he lunged towards the bathroom and locked the door behind him.

He made it to the toilet before he threw up.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You all are fantastic and so much fun to chat with in the comments! Your brains are all extremely precious, so beware, dubcon intensifies in this chapter. See detailed notes at the end of the chapter.

Eliot had been nineteen when he shipped out on his first tour to Afghanistan. Six months in, he was riding in a convoy listening to the driver of his Humvee tell awful jokes when an explosion turned everything red. When Eliot had woken up he’d been tied to a chair in the dark, blood dripping into his eyes.

It was how Eliot’s life went. He could never be sure where the bomb was or when it would explode, but it always did.

Eliot knew he had been the one to set this bomb and push the detonator. He just had no idea how he’d done it. 

 

 

* * * *

 

 

Parker was up on the roof.

She’d been up there seventy-three minutes.

It wasn’t a very high roof, all things considered. Residential buildings had zoning laws that kept them boringly short. It didn’t really matter, though—she didn’t think any building would be high enough right now.

The window of the third floor bedroom opened. No one stuck their head out, but that quiet, open window was definitely a Hardison invitation.

After seventy-three minutes of alone time, Hardison sounded like a good idea.

Parker used her powers to swing herself down and jump headfirst through the window.

Hardison broke her fall, her momentum toppling both of them to the floor. She rolled off him without a word. The two of them lay on their backs, their sides pressed close together.

The ceiling in this room was painted light blue. It didn’t look anything like the sky.

“Hardison,” she said quietly, “did we break Eliot for real?”

His voice was even quieter. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Hardison reached for her hand and she twined her fingers with his.

They lay like that for eight minutes.

“I thought about leaving when I was up on the roof.”

“I figured. I thought about leaving and I wasn’t even perched on the roof like a giant metaphor.”

“People shouldn’t stay with people who hurt them. That’s what I said.”

“Parker, it wasn’t you doing the hurting.”

“I told you both it was okay.”

“Doesn’t matter. It was me who did it. If anyone leaves, it should be me.”

Parker squeezed his hand tight, fear making her grip stronger. “No, Hardison. Don’t.”

Hardison turned his head to look at her. She turned hers too, so their noses tapped together. “I’ve never messed up this bad before.”

“I have.”

“What did you do?”

“I left.”

Hardison’s dark eyes stared right into her. “Did it help?”

“I meant that leaving was the mistake,” Parker said. “So no. It didn’t.”

Hardison closed his eyes. “Didn’t think so.”

Parker pressed her face close to his where it was safe.

“Maybe we can fix it,” she said, whispering the words small and hopeful next to his ear.

“You think so?”

“We have to. It’s the rules of Always Bad. Walk away or fix it.”

“No walking away.”

“No walking away,” Parker repeated, promising.

Hardison gripped her close for a second before slowly pulling away from her and sitting up. She sat up too and got a good look at him.

Hardison’s face looked like someone had beat him up inside. His eyes always got so red after he’d been crying.

“We have to be serious about it,” Hardison said. He rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand. “Eliot has to be sure we won’t mess him up again, if he even wants us after all this.”

Parker remembered that morning in the bathroom, how warm and complete it felt to have Eliot and Hardison with her. She and Hardison had been good before, when it had been just the two of them. But they were better with Eliot. She really, really hoped he wanted to stay.

“How do we show him we’re serious?” she asked.

“No more readings,” Hardison said immediately.

“Good. And we do things he likes. Nice things.”

Hardison looked a little stumped. “What does Eliot like?”

Lists. Parker was good at lists. She liked the way they sorted the details she noticed and then let Hardison help her understand what the details meant.

“Country music,” she said. “Punching people. Fishing. Cooking.”

“Do we know that?” Hardison interrupted.

“Huh?”

“He always cooks for us.” Hardison’s bruised-inside face got a little more hurt. “Every meal we’ve had since we met him—I thought back. So are we sure he likes it, or is it one of those things where he’s giving us what we want?”

Parker stared at Hardison. He stared back at her.

She hadn’t even noticed Eliot had been doing that, and Parker was good at noticing things.

“Are we bad?” Parker asked. She needed to know. She needed him to explain what all of this meant.

“I think a little,” Hardison said. He wrapped his arms around himself. “We’re definitely bad at speaking Eliot.”

“Eliot uses his body to talk, like I do.” Parker sat up straighter. “Nice touching. We should do that for him, how you do for me.”

In the beginning, when she was still getting used to him, Hardison had held her hand like he couldn’t bear to hurt her even a tiny bit. Even now, he touched her like she was something special. He hugged her like he couldn’t believe he got to do it. It was one of the ways Parker knew how much he liked her.

Maybe that would help Eliot understand.

Hardison looked nervous. “At the very least, it’ll give him an excuse to punch me.”

“Eliot wouldn’t punch you.” Parker nudged him with her foot, because this was important. “Hardison. Eliot would never—”

“I know.”

“Don’t joke about that.” Parker’s newly awakened powers could break bones, but she didn’t feel dangerous because Hardison and Eliot didn’t treat her that way. Eliot was just as dangerous as she was, so they had to be careful he didn’t feel that way either.

“See, that’s another thing, Parker. You’ve got to tell me if something feels off to you. You and Eliot are like kindred spirits or whatever. I’m just a nerd who lived with his nanna until a few years ago.”

Parker nudged him again. “That’s not all you are.”

“Right.” His voice took on an edge pointed at himself. “Apparently I’m also Evil Empath Hardison on my days off.”

“Eliot should have told you that readings made him feel bad.” Parker was actually sort of upset with Eliot when she thought about it. Hardison had asked him if he was okay a lot of times, and Eliot had lied.

You didn’t lie to your team.

And now, Hardison was shaking his head like he didn’t believe her. “He _was_ telling me, deep down. I just wasn’t paying enough attention.”

“You don’t always know everything, remember?” Parker said. “And you’re an empath, not a telepath. You can’t actually read minds.”

Hardison was looking at her with a stubborn face. “It was my mistake.”

“So let’s go fix it,” Parker said. She stood up and offered Hardison a hand.

“Eliot isn’t going to want to talk about this, you know. He hates talking about feelings.”

“Then we’ll have to make him.”

“I would literally rather go to prison than go downstairs,” Hardison said. He took her hand and hauled himself up. “Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll have a heart attack and die on the stairs.” He looked slightly more cheerful at that thought. “Yep. Let’s try that. Or hey, even better, I fake a heart attack so that you both have to forgive me because you think I’m dead, and I can go off and live in a cave somewhere. A cave with internet.”

“I do forgive you,” she said. “I know you’re mostly worried about what Eliot’s going to say. But for what it’s worth, that’s what I say.”

Hardison looked down. “It’s worth a lot.”

“Do you forgive me? For not stopping you?”

“Of course.” Now he could look at her. “Every time. Always. You know that.”

“It’s still nice to hear it.”

 

* * * *

 

Parker and Hardison had vanished. Eliot hadn’t even had time to ask a question, they were just…gone.

There were sandwiches to make and a kitchen to clean. There were duffle bags to pack, now that the Trent job was done.

Parker and Hardison started talking upstairs.

Eliot associated the feeling in his throat with long night hours before a mission or waiting outside Moreau’s private meeting room. Dread.

He was grateful when they came downstairs. He finished wiping the counter and rinsed out the sponge, ready to confess to whatever he had done, ready to get the penance over with and put this whole day behind him.

But they didn’t ask for his confession.

They talked frantically, overlapping each other and rambling from the point, the way they always did—and then they asked for his forgiveness.

“What?” Eliot said.

The dread was back, stronger than before.

They had both been upset with him when they left, and he knew they still were. But instead of telling him what he’d done and letting him fix it, they were borrowing a play from fucking Damien Moreau. Guess the crime and choose his own punishment, but if he guessed wrong…

Hardison looked like someone had punched him. “We get it if you want to leave.”

“We’d never stop you,” Parker said. She had her hands knotted together in front of her.

“ _What_?”

“But we want you to stay, and we hope you forgive us, man. And, and that’s basically it.”

“We really do want you to stay,” Parker said, more earnestly than Eliot had ever heard.

Eliot curled his hands into fists to stop himself from hitting something.

As far as he’d been able to deduce from their hysterical ramblings, they were angry with him for giving them what they wanted.

And now they were telling him they wanted him to stay.

It was the kind of game Moreau had loved to play: the kind with no right answer, no possibility of success. He hadn’t thought that was the kind of thing the three of them did.

“Don’t pull crap like this on me,” Eliot said roughly.

Hardison and Parker exchanged a meaningful look.

“I’m sorry, I know you hate it, man,” Hardison said. “Humor us, okay?”

That was that.

The key to these games was admitting defeat at the very beginning, and then picking whatever choice would cause the least damage.

Anything would be better than leaving them. Anything.

“I’m not going to leave,” Eliot said.

The relief on their faces was a beautiful sight, like the sun peeking out after a week of rain. It made Eliot hesitate. Maybe he was reading this situation wrong. “And I forgive you, okay?”

Parker’s smile was bright enough to light the whole damn room. Hardison looked like he was going to cry, but this time in a happy way.

One point for the home team.

“Hell,” Eliot said, watching them carefully, “I should be apologizing.”

He wasn’t sure what for—but their faces told him that had been the correct stab in the dark.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Parker said. She was still radiant, though.  

No letting Hardison push emotions, got it. “Well, I won’t anymore.”

He couldn’t help the irritation in his voice. How was it his damn fault if they didn’t tell him the rules until afterward?

Hardison wasn’t smiling. “Eliot,” he said, seriously. “No more readings.”

Everything.

Froze.

Oh god, not that.

Hardison made a noise of distress. “I am so sorry. I can’t even begin—”

“Don’t.” A plea for mercy.

Stopping the readings like this was going to drain the life out of him.

“Never again,” Hardison said, the word of the lord.

Eliot’s mind was going to burn, like it had after Moreau.

Only this time it would be worse, because he actually wanted Hardison. He wanted a place with them, the one he’d had—the one they were taking away.

It had been theirs to give and take away in the first place, he reminded himself.

“Alright,” he said, accepting his punishment.

Hardison finally relaxed. “Alright.”

Moreau had stopped readings sometimes, when Eliot had offended him badly enough. Once, he’d strung Eliot along for two weeks on light, maddening teases followed by days of nothing. It was the first time in Eliot’s life he’d begged anyone for anything.

He would beg Parker and Hardison too, if that’s what it took to fix this.

 

 

* * * *

 

They decided to stay in the townhouse a little longer. Hardison couldn’t imagine starting another job right now. He needed to wait until he felt less shaky and Parker stopped jumping at noises and Eliot got color back in his emotions.

Hardison was relieved that Eliot had forgiven him, of course, but he was also worried about it. Eliot kept forgiving him for violating his mind. Even if Hardison hadn’t meant to, it was still a bad thing.

Eliot treated it like it was normal. Like he didn’t expect Hardison not to hurt him and didn’t hold it against him when he did.

( _“The people who hurt you the least,_ ” Eliot had told Randy.)

It was heartbreaking. It was actually breaking Hardison’s heart, the more he thought about it.

Hardison just wanted to keep Eliot and Parker safe from the demons inside their heads. He didn’t want to be the person who made it worse.

So, he focused on making it up to Eliot as quickly as he could. Operation Be Nice to Eliot was in full swing, complete with a new sports package for their TV and a fishing simulation game he had overnighted.

Eliot hadn’t grumbled about the presents when Hardison had presented them, which was—weird. But understandable. All three of them were tiptoeing around each other, being extra polite after the disaster that had been yesterday. Parker had actually asked to use his phone instead of grabbing it out of his hand like she always did.

Eliot had gone on four runs today already—one with Parker, three alone. He didn’t look any happier when he got back. If anything, as he stormed through the front door, he looked wound even tighter than he had this morning.

“I thought running was supposed to be relaxing,” Hardison said. He perched on the steps and watched Eliot stretch his hamstrings or whatever on the landing.

Eliot just grunted at him.

“You don’t look relaxed, is all I’m saying.” Eliot didn’t feel relaxed either. In fact, he didn’t feel like much of anything. “Maybe you need a new hobby. Like tai chi. I could get you one of those instructional DVDs if you wanted to learn.”

Eliot snapped out his reply. “If you want me to relax, you know what to do.”

“I know, I know. Shut up and leave you alone. Sorry, I’m leaving.”

He got something from Eliot, then, stronger than anything all day. Eliot’s despair filled the space between them, thick like smoke.

“Woah, not like, _leaving,_ leaving. It’s okay.”

Eliot’s face said very clearly that something was not okay.

Hardison remembered what Parker had said about Eliot communicating through touch. Well, no time like the present to try out a truly crazy idea.

Before he could change his mind, Hardison bounded down the steps and wrapped his arms around Eliot for two seconds. When he pulled away, Eliot was looking a little more hopeful—more animation in his face than he’d had all day. And he hadn’t broken Hardison’s nose, so yay.

Maybe Parker had been right.

Hardison smiled at Eliot and walked back up the stairs. “Come on, I’m going to make us lunch.”

Eliot’s despair was greying out now. That was probably good.

 

 

All that day, it became a game to see how many of Eliot’s self-appointed tasks they could preempt and do for him.

“I’m going on a security sweep,” Eliot said after lunch.

“Parker’s on it,” Hardison said.

An hour later, Eliot went to load the dishwasher, but there was nothing to load because Hardison had already done it.

That evening, Eliot said, “I’m going to make dinner.”

“Hardison ordered Thai food,” Parker said. “Sit down and relax.”

Eliot looked like he didn’t know what to do with himself, like he had never had this much free time in his life. Hardison and Parker shared a secret, proud smile. 

 

 

* * * *

 

Parker had done her part during dinner by levitating the empty containers into the garbage so Eliot didn’t do it. The plan was working—she and Hardison had found lots of things to do for Eliot.

She wasn’t entirely sure he was happy, though.

Punching something was on the list of things he liked and Parker could make that happen.

“Hey,” she said, tapping Eliot on the arm. “Come on.”

He followed her down to the basement—an empty room with cold cement floor and walls. It was only lit with one lightbulb, hanging naked from the ceiling. It threw jagged shadows on the wall.

“What, Parker?” Eliot didn’t look like he cared why they were there. He didn’t look like he cared about much of anything.

“You want to do more training?” Parker asked.

That got his attention. The lightbulb reflected in his eyes. “Yes,” he said.

“What do you want to do?”

Eliot shifted his feet, settling into the space. “Use your powers to keep me away from you.” There was anticipation in his voice at last. “Use them however you want, and use them hard.”

It wasn’t much of a training strategy, but Parker didn’t time to say so before Eliot was lunging towards her.

It took everything she had to keep out of his reach. He wasn’t pulling his punches, so she didn’t hold back either. She pulled out every trick she knew, and some she just made up on the spot.

The light played on his face in the same sharp shadows that painted the wall.

He came at her unexpectedly from the right and Parker reacted instinctively, hitting him with her powers so hard that he smashed against the cement wall.

He picked himself up and there was blood in his smile. “Good. Try that again.”

It pinged something in her memory.

Parker had made it her mission to study Eliot’s smiles, and she knew she’d seen that one before.

He almost got a kick past her guard, but she slammed him hard against the floor.

He smiled again.

It was his grateful smile. The one he’d given her when she’d stepped on his foot to break Moreau’s control.

Parker was good with her powers, but Eliot was also really, really fast. He could be dodging her if he actually wanted to.

Parker stopped the lesson by pinning Eliot up against the wall.

He was breathing hard, but he did look calmer than he had since yesterday. Besides, this position was familiar. It was their thing.

“This empath stuff really messed you up, didn’t it?” Parker made her voice quiet, because the basement echoed and she didn’t want her words to escape up to Hardison. He felt guilty enough as it was.

Eliot sighed. “Parker…”

She tightened her power’s hold on him. “Didn’t it?”

Eliot nodded, watching her carefully.

“Hardison won’t get into your head again,” Parker said. Eliot had to know that Hardison wouldn’t hurt him on purpose.

“I know,” Eliot said, his voice thick.

“But this helps.” Parker gestured to him, his hands roughed up and reddened from catching himself against the cement.

Eliot nodded again.

Helping Eliot was the point.

“We can do this more,” Parker said. “If it makes you feel better.”

Eliot’s whole body slumped with relief. “Okay.”

By the end, Eliot had bruises on his arms and his side, as well as a scrape across his cheekbone from the floor. When she poked at it, he leaned into her touch.

 

 

During their movie that night, Parker watched Eliot. He did this thing where he kept his eyes open, but he clearly wasn’t seeing anything that was happening. It was like the other morning, before she’d made him run.

She had wedged herself beside him on the couch. Every time she saw him go away inside his head, she picked a bruise and pressed on it.

Eliot always blinked back to awareness, and he always gave her that same grateful look.

 

 

At three in the morning, Eliot went down to the basement. She stopped practicing her lock picking and followed him.

That time, he smashed one of his fingers against the wall so hard, it started to bleed.

“I’ll get the goop,” Parker said.

Eliot stopped her with his not-bloody hand. “It’s fine. Let’s just keep going.”

“Are you okay?” she asked him. She didn’t mean his finger.

Eliot just looked at her.

Parker wanted to melt some of that tiredness out of his bones. She knew he hadn’t slept last night, and he wasn’t going to sleep tonight. “Be okay.”

“Sure,” he said.

Hardison and Eliot called her their mastermind. They listened to her. That meant she had to be in charge, even when she was pretty sure she was doing everything wrong.

Even when she didn’t want to be in charge.

 

 

* * * *

 

Eliot was a creature built out of _want._

It was the only thing that stayed, as all his other emotions dimmed without Hardison in his head. It wasn’t just about readings. Eliot also wanted other things—the knowledge that they needed him, the satisfaction of having a place on the team.

They hadn’t let him do anything for the past two days, pointed reminders of his uselessness.

And they kept touching him.

Parker would rest her hand on Eliot’s arm when she stood close. When he walked past him, Hardison’s fingers would touch his back, just a brief second of hope, before pulling away again.

Mind, skills, body. These were things that made up Eliot Spencer. They didn’t want his empath-perfect mind and they weren’t letting him use his skills, so there was only one option left. And they were giving him some pretty damn strong cues.

Eliot knew what this had meant with Moreau.

Some desperate, logical part of his brain was trying to remind him that this was Hardison and Parker. They didn’t play these games. They wouldn’t want what Moreau had wanted.

But Eliot was slipping. There were times when he wasn’t in the townhouse at all—he was with Moreau in Brussels or Prague or fucking _Belgrade_.

His body kept trying to slide into actions without his permission, like someone was flipping on the autopilot inside him. He’d stopped every impulse so far, usually with Parker’s grounding pain to help him, but it was only a matter of time.

 

 

 

Parker finally got skittish in their training sessions after Eliot smacked his head off the wall and made himself bleed.

“Let’s ease up,” she said, her hands sliding through his hair to examine the cut.

“It’s the only thing that helps.”

Want and pain—the only things that cut through the haze of grey.

Parker was radiating concern. Her hands in his hair felt nice. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Eliot barely stopped the laugh that bubbled up in his throat.

“If you don’t help me, I’ll do this myself,” he told her.

Her hands stilled in his hair. Parker was smart—she could imagine what that would be like.

“No,” she ordered. “Don’t do that.”

“Then help me.”

Parker looked so sad. She pressed her forehead against his, like he’d seen her do with Hardison. She was strong and comforting against him, and Eliot let his eyes close. He hadn’t slept for three days.

“Parker,” he said. “Tell me something you want me to do.”

“I don’t want you to do anything,” Parker said. “Just be _Eliot_.”

Eliot had no idea what that meant to her.

 

 

 

Parker slipped out the front door after they walked up from the basement. Everything hurt—from the ache inside his head to the bruises on his limbs.

Eliot climbed the stairs with merciless speed. The pain was good.

Hardison was in one of the bedrooms, sitting on the bed with his tech sprawled out around him. He glanced up from his screens and called to Eliot, “The _Walking Dead_ vibe is its own level of badass, but dude, you have got to get some sleep. You look so much like my nanna’s meatloaf that it’s actually starting to concern me.” Hardison sounded like an angry rooster. It should have been funny, but it wasn’t.

Eliot _wanted_.

Parker had all but refused to keep helping him, and when that was gone, Eliot wasn’t entirely sure if his brain would survive whatever hell it was going through. There was no other option—he needed what Hardison could give him.

And like it had been waiting for that exact thought, the autopilot turned itself on inside Eliot’s head.

Click.

 

* * * *

 

Hardison was usually pretty impressed by Eliot—but the fact that he managed to move across the room with grace was more impressive than most things he’d seen the man do. If Hardison had been half as exhausted as Eliot looked, he’d have been flat on his face.

“Are you coming down with some kind of bug?” Hardison asked. “Because I wasn’t kidding about you looking like a zombie. Zombie flu, maybe?”

Eliot smiled at him.

Hardison hadn’t seen Eliot smile in days, so he beamed back. “I will get you the best chicken noodle soup that money can buy, from any place you want.”

Eliot sat on the edge of the bed. Hardison scooched back to make room for him. “I’d offer to make it for you myself, but we both know you would end up stabbing me with the ladle for crimes against the culinary arts or whatever.”

Eliot kicked off his shoes.

“You wouldn’t actually stab me, I know that,” Hardison said, remembering what Parker had told him a little too late. “Obviously. And anyway, does chicken noodle soup really count as a culinary art? It’s more—oh. Um. It’s more—more of a—I’m sorry, is there a reason why you’re suddenly stripping in my bedroom?”

Eliot had taken off his socks and his outer shirt, leaving the black tank top he had underneath. “Chicken soup is more of a what?”

“What?”

“You said chicken soup is more of a—something.” Eliot took out his hair tie and ran his hands through his hair.

“More of a home cooking thing,” Hardison said slowly. “Not an art thing. Eliot, if you want to sleep here, that’s cool. Let me just move my stuff.”

“Stay.”

There were lots of different ways to say that word. And the way Eliot was saying it now was not how Eliot had ever spoken to him before.

“What—what is that voice?” Hardison sputtered.

Eliot moved closer and Hardison pulled back. “What voice?”

“Your _voice_ , man. That’s your ‘I am so charming’ voice. Why you pulling that out?”

Eliot’s smile never faltered, but his eyes went a little blank at the question. He shook his head and pressed in closer, pushing Hardison right up against the headboard. “Yes. That’s the answer to your other questions.”

“What?” Hardison said, his voice a squeak.

“Yes, chicken soup counts as culinary art.” Eliot pressed himself against Hardison’s knees, which Hardison had put up as a last-ditched effort of defense. “And yes, there’s a reason I’m stripping in your bedroom.”

“What is _happening?_ ” Hardison wailed. He made shooing motions with both hands. “Move back. Go away. Are you delirious? Did you take drugs? Eliot, for real, are you on drugs right this very second?”

Eliot grabbed both of Hardison’s hands with one of his own in with some sort of fancy move. “Calm down.”

“ _You_ calm down!”

“Hardison.” Eliot’s grip was gentle, but strong. His finger drew a line on the back of one of Hardison’s hands.

Even with Hardison’s mental shields firmly in place, that line burned with invitation.

Hardison took a deep breath. “We’ve been through this.”

“Not quite.” Eliot’s light touch trailed up Hardison’s arm and fire followed.

“Don’t—”

Eliot slipped his hand under the neckline of Hardison’s t-shirt and traced his fingers along Hardison’s collarbone. His touch ate through Hardison’s shields like a flame through silk.

Hardison had been trying to deny that he’d missed being in Eliot’s mind. Because Eliot was more important than some stupid preference.

(He had missed it so much that it had made his hands shake the first day, and that had scared him.)

Eliot guided Hardison’s hands to his bare shoulder, and the contact closed the loop between them and vaporized what was left of Hardison’s defenses. Eliot’s mind was open and aching in front of him.

Hardison could feel his _want_ , so strong it edged into pain. Hardison’s knees relaxed, unbending enough for Eliot to push them apart and kneel between them.

 “That’s it,” Eliot said, low and southern. His eyes were dark. He brushed a fingertip against Hardison’s cheek.

“Oh help,” Hardison whispered.

(Hardison had said _don’t_ and Eliot had ignored him. That wasn’t Eliot. None of this was right.)

Hardison was too afraid to move. He felt like one twitch could send him falling into Eliot’s mind, and he didn’t know if he could find his way out again. “Stop.”

It was like Eliot wasn’t even hearing him. His hands were all over Hardison.

Hardison’s words came out in a breath against Eliot’s skin: “Chocolate espresso. Eliot, please. Eliot.”

Eliot’s desperate touches slowed. He pulled back, the smile snapping off his face like he hadn’t wanted it there in the first place.

For a moment they just stayed where they were, a tableau.

Eliot bit down hard on his lip and moved completely off the bed, backing up until he was almost at the door.

“What was that?” Hardison asked him. The words came out shaky and hurt. He tucked his knees back up against his chest.

Eliot’s eyes were as wide as Hardison’s. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t give me that, you have to know a little.” Hardison’s pulse was thundering in his ears. “People don’t just do that for no reason. Do you want—that kind of stuff? With—me?”

“No.” Eliot said it so fast it would have pricked Hardison’s pride if he hadn’t been relieved to know that he’d read the situation right.

“Well gosh, I don’t know how I could have gotten the wrong impression.”

“I’m sorry,” Eliot said. He sure looked it. Hardison had his shields up strong again and he could still feel Eliot’s remorse, brighter than any of his emotions in the past few days. He kept backing toward the door.

“Don’t leave,” Hardison said urgently. “Talk to me, please.”

“I told you, I don’t know what that was. I don’t know why I did it.” Eliot felt so terrible, it had to be the truth. “I can’t be here.”

“Take a breath and calm down.”

 “You have no idea what I could have done.”

“You aren’t going to do anyth—”

“Three seconds. That’s how long it would take to pin you down with your hands behind your back. With the right hold, you wouldn’t be able to break free, no matter what I did.” Eliot’s hands were in fists, and they were trembling. “Hardison. You have _no idea._ ”

Hardison was shaken up by what had just happened, sure, but he wasn’t afraid of Eliot. He was afraid _for_ Eliot. “You’re a badass, I get it. But you wouldn’t have been able to hurt me.” Hardison made a face, stopping Eliot’s protest. “For heaven’s sake. I could explode your brain if I really tried, remember?”

“But you wouldn’t. You would let me—”

“Yeah, sorry. No. You are actually the only person in this room with a martyr complex. I asked you to stop and you stopped. If you hadn’t, I would have made you.”

Eliot was searching him for a lie, but there wasn’t one for him to find. Hardison saw Eliot believe him, because he relaxed, just a tiny bit. “Good.”

“Someday we’re going to have a talk about the irony of this conversation and maybe, if I’m sleep-deprived and full of enough sugar, the rest of it. But right now, we have bigger problems. You don’t know why you did something, and that is all kinds of bad. There’s something going on with you, isn’t there?”

“Come on, Hardison.”

“Seriously! I’m not stupid. I’m actually pretty smart, most days. Your brain feels like _Wizard of Oz_ before the technicolor. You’re bringing out the bedroom moves and then telling me you don’t know why. Something is clearly going on!”

Eliot’s remorse didn’t abate, but something else joined it—a wavering sense of uncertainty.

“I’m not trying to read you, Eliot, but I can feel you wondering about something. Whatever it is, I’m probably wondering too. So just ask me, please. I can’t read your mind!”

Eliot hesitated in the doorway. And for a minute, Hardison thought he was just going to retreat without a word, like he’d been doing. But then Eliot asked, “How much do you know about the effects of long-term readings?”

“Effects? You mean putting a mark on someone’s brain like Nate talked about?”

“No. Other things.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know.” Was he failing a test? Hardison gripped his knees a little closer to his body.

Eliot was very focused, like Hardison’s answers were the most important words he could ever hear. “Then why did you stop?”

After everything that had just happened, it was ridiculous that _this_ was the thing that made the back of Hardison’s neck get warm. “You didn’t like them. And they were nice or whatever, but man, that’s not the point of this.” Hardison waved his hands to encompass him and Eliot and the place Parker should have been.

Eliot’s stare was one of the more terrifying things Hardison had ever seen. He looked like he was ready to pounce. That look on Eliot always set Hardison babbling out of sheer evolutionary instinct.

“What I mean is, it wasn’t the readings who saved my ass the first day we met. Me and Parker, we like you. The three of us are better together. Or I think we could be, once I stop hurting your brain and you stop ambushing me on beds. That’s the point of all this. Um, right?”

Eliot took a few steps back into the center of the room. The look on his _face—_ like he’d been given a gift that would kill him.

“Maybe we should talk?” Hardison suggested, warily. “Because this is looking like news to you, and that is honestly freaking me out a little.”

“Dammit, Hardison,” Eliot said. He ran his hand over his face. “Just. _Dammit_.”

 

 

 

So, it turned out that empath withdrawal was a thing. And it turned out that Moreau had been even more of a bastard than Hardison had guessed.

Eliot told him some horrible things, all in the same calm, businesslike voice. Like it didn’t matter that he’d been pretty sure Hardison had been torturing him on purpose for the past few days. Whatever. No big deal. What’s a little empath torture between friends?

Hardison sat frozen by Eliot’s words. He hadn’t unlocked his grip on his knees. Eliot hadn’t tried to move any closer.

When Eliot eventually stopped talking, the silence was a kind of bliss.

But Eliot’s uncertainty was growing, and the _want_ was growing too, lurking behind everything, now that Hardison knew to look for it.

“How bad is it right now?” Hardison asked.

“It doesn’t get better for a while.” It wasn’t an answer. But really, what sort of scale would the two of them use to discuss pain? Eliot’s two was probably Hardison’s ten.

“How long will it take to calm down?”

“Took about a week last time.”

“But it was worse last time, right?”

Eliot’s words were a slow offer of trust. “Not exactly.”

“Eliot,” Hardison said, “this is like, drugs or something. I’m not into drugs! If we keep doing this, we’ll end up homeless with terrible teeth and Parker will have to stage an intervention, and honestly, that would be terrifying. We can’t.”

“Fine.”

“Fine? What, just like that?”

Eliot gave him an exasperated look that was so _Eliot_ that Hardison felt his death grip on his knees relax. “I can’t force you to use your powers.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.” Hardison needed to be sure Eliot understood that. “This is scary stuff, man.”

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.” 

“And the irony keeps on coming.” Hardison raised his hands to field Eliot’s glare. “Yes, alright, I get it. Thanks. So do we think the empath stuff is what made you go all southern comfort on me?”

“Don’t call it that. And no, that was something else. I don’t know what.”

“How much of this does Parker know?”

Eliot nodded to the window beside the bed.

Hardison turned quickly, and sure enough, Parker was peeking through the window. “How long have you been there?”

“For the explanation part. I put together the rest.” Parker pulled herself through the open window.

Hardison was relieved she hadn’t seen what had gone on before. Parker had seen stuff in the holding centers that she didn’t talk about, but Hardison had pieced together enough hints and flinches to know that it would have dragged up bad memories.

Parker walked right up to Eliot and said, “See? Hardison said what I said.”

“I noticed.”

“We want to be nice to you, not hurt you.” Parker looked frustrated. “We just keep messing it up.”

Hardison could unbend now that she was here. He buried his head in his arms. “I’m pretty sure when your friend thinks you’ve been torturing him on purpose, that’s a little more than a mess up. That’s ‘drink poison to atone’ levels of disaster.”

“I never said I thought that,” Eliot said dismissively. “This is just brain stuff. I’ve actually _been_ tortured, Hardison.”

Hardison curled his arms even more protectively around his head. “Why would you say that? Why on earth would you tell me something so upsetting? I am trying to have a conversation.”

“Real, actual torture.” There was a wisp of amusement in Eliot’s emotions now.

“Ack, no!” Hardison jerked his head up, making a scene of it just so he could feel that amusement grow a little more substantial.

 “This ain’t even in the same league,” Eliot continued. “You wouldn’t recognize torture if someone came at you with a pair of jumper cables.”

“Seriously, this is the kind of joke that makes you feel better? Seriously?”

Parker said, “The joke is that you’re funny when you’re pretending to be upset.”

Hardison hadn’t realized he’d missed feeling Eliot’s affection until it was back, bright and warm. With all the craziness that had been going on, Hardison had lost sight of the fact that Eliot just plain liked them. Eliot thought they were funny or cute or whatever it was that made Eliot like people.

Hardison liked Eliot too. There was so much to like.

Hardison said, “Want to hear a rant I’ve been perfecting about the asshole genius architype in television? I think it’s very compelling.”

“Not really,” Parker said. “But thanks.”

Eliot was watching them and the affection coming from him was almost wistful—the smell of old paper mixed in with everything else.

Nothing about Eliot’s emotions made sense.

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you,” Hardison said again.

“I heard you the first time.”

“Well, it bears repeating.”

“Not fifty times it doesn’t.” Eliot looked so done with this conversation.

“Alright, alright.”

Parker was still standing close to Eliot. “Are you a little better right now?”

Eliot looked at her with some surprise. “I guess.”

“You should tell us what we did so that we can do it again. Help us be nice to you. Please?” Parker added the last word like she wasn’t sure she was using it properly.

Eliot was clearly as susceptible to that word as Hardison was, because he answered her question. “You didn’t do anything. You were just…” Eliot trailed off, trusting them to fill in the blanks. Hardison had spent a long time on his own, just him and his chat rooms, before Parker had vaulted into his life. It wasn’t hard to figure out what Eliot meant.

(Just _there_. Just _you_.)

Parker nodded, like she got it. She had been alone a lot too, before.

“And I need to work,” Eliot said.

“On it,” Hardison said immediately. “I’ll find a job with people you can punch. That sound good?”

“Yes. I just—I need a few hours of quiet before we go. I’m not thinking clearly.” Eliot gestured to Hardison, almost helplessly. “Obviously.”

“You haven’t been sleeping,” Parker said. “Not even naps.”

“I would if I could.”

Eliot’s exhaustion was evident, dragging his voice down low and scratchy.

“Zombie,” Hardison said. “I say it again, with all love.”

Parker picked her way carefully through her sentence. “Would that be a nice thing? Helping you sleep?”

“I don’t take medication.”

“No,” Parker promised.

Eliot seemed to lose his energy to keep up appearances. “That might help.” He rubbed his forehead. “Maybe. I wouldn’t know—I can never sleep when I’m like this.”

(How many times had Moreau done this to Eliot on purpose?)

“That was before,” Parker said. “You were alone. But you’re not alone anymore.”

Eliot looked like he wanted to say something. Words were hovering on his lips, and Hardison waited, straining to see if he could read them.

Eliot bit them back. He had clearly said everything he was going to say for the moment.

Parker flicked her hand at Hardison, waving him off the bed. Hardison jumped up and cleared off his tech.

“Type something,” Parker told him. “No talking.”

Hardison had no idea what that had to do with Eliot sleeping, but Eliot didn’t protest when Parker nudged him to the bed, so she must have been on to something.

Hardison sat with his back against the opposite wall so Eliot could be sure Hardison wasn’t off getting kidnapped or whatever it was Eliot worried about. He set about fulfilling Eliot’s request: a psychic kid who would be guarded by people to punch.

He valiantly kept his eyes on his screen even though he could hear rustling and quiet talking. Parker’s task was sleep. Hardison’s was finding the job.

When he finally settled on one, he let himself look up to see what was happening. His fingers kept typing a briefing script, doing what Parker had asked.

Eliot was lying on his side, turned toward Parker and watching her. His arms were pillowed under his head.

Parker was sitting on the floor. She rested her cheek on the covers, so her face was mirroring Eliot’s. She was talking, quiet and steady. “—but the keypad was a seven digit rolling encryption. So I knew the tunnels were the way in. They were only a little wet, and anyway, people pay salons to cover them in mud.”

Eliot looked like he was fighting to keep his eyes open.

“I mean, why put tunnels under your castle if you didn’t want thieves to use them?” Parker closed her eyes in a deliberate kind of way, leading by example. “It’s not like some old, fat duke was going to make his escape out of them when I barely fit.”

Eliot’s eyes drifted shut. They opened. They closed again and stayed closed.

Parker’s voice got quieter. She really only needed a whisper for Eliot to hear her, their heads were so close. “It looked pretty in the light, all that gold. And the vault was amazing. Took fourteen minutes to crack. That’s a long time, Eliot. Eliot?” His name was just the barest breath.

Parker opened her eyes and watched Eliot for a few seconds, making sure he was asleep. From his muffled emotions, Hardison knew he was.

Parker smiled. She closed her eyes again and matched her breathing to his.

Hardison knew now why Parker had told him to type. The soft sound filled the silence, padding it and making it easy to sink into. He’d never really noticed that about his computers before.

Hardison typed for hours, and he was grateful for every single minute.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Parker and Hardison are doing nice things that accidentally make all Eliot's issues worse. It culminates with Eliot cornering Hardison on a bed and trying make a reading happen. No kissing or sex, but slight sexytimes.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooo I figured out that I needed an extra chapter to wrap this all up. Sorry for BLATANTLY LYING TO YOUR FACES. Shocking. Disgraceful. 
> 
> Here, have some niceness!

“Olivia Livingston sounds like a comic book name.”

“She was originally Olivia Sterling before her mom remarried. If that helps,” Hardison’s voice said in Parker’s ear.

“It doesn’t,” Eliot said, and she heard his whisper in surround sound, beside her and in the earbud.

The night was dark, clouds blotting out the moon and stars. Perfect thief weather. Parker and Eliot were on the north end of the Livingston house, waiting for Hardison to disable security from the terminal on the east side. Two unconscious bodies shared their hiding spot by the kitchen door—the security guards whose routes they’d charted all day yesterday.

Eliot crouched next to her in the bushes. “Who plants yews by a doorway?” he muttered. “It’s a security nightmare.”

“Maybe they didn’t know that,” Parker said.

“Livingston hires good security. All the guys we’ve run into have been ex-intelligence and ex-Marines.” Eliot sounded happy about that.

Hardison had found them a good job.

“Seven minutes until the next patrol walks past you, Hardison,” she said. “Pick up the pace.”

“Pick up the pace? Excuse me! I’m trying to decode an extremely advanced security system while hiding behind a tree from GI Joe’s big brother.”

Parker shifted from foot to foot at the hushed anxiety in Hardison’s voice. Splitting up had been the best plan, and the boys had accepted it without complaint. It should have made her feel good, but it hadn’t. Parker was getting tired of being in charge. She kept accidentally telling them to do the wrong things.

She hoped splitting up hadn’t been wrong.

Eliot glanced at her, just a dark smudge of movement against the blackness.

Eliot was doing better. Now that he was talking to them, they’d been able to actually do things he liked; things that helped him. Parker realized that she shouldn’t have been hurting Eliot, no matter how much he’d asked. That had definitely been wrong. Hardison had figured out that when Eliot’s eyes got blank and his body started moving without his permission, it was enough to simply talk. Their voices brought him out of it.

Parker hadn’t figured that out because it hadn’t occurred to her to try.

“You know at least some of these guards are for Olivia.” Eliot was reassuring her. “She doesn’t want to be here.”

According to the security logs, Olivia had made a break for it about a month ago, but Livingston’s men had brought her back.

“I know. That’s why we’re stealing her.”

“As soon as the doors go green.”

When Parker had run from the Bureau, no one had caught her. But lots of kids had tried before her. She’d seen them get dragged back and put in isolation. Or medical.

No one should keep kids who didn’t want to be kept.

“Parker, hang on. I thought you said I had seven minutes!”

Hardison’s panic was a sudden jolt of adrenaline. It prickled down Parker’s scalp. “You do. You should!”

“I don’t! There’s someone—Woah, hey, big guy with a gun. I’m just, you know. Checking the system. It helps to do it at night because the sun interferes with the— _oof_!”

The sound of breath being punched out of Hardison was something Parker needed to shut behind the door in her head.

Eliot was already moving, breaking cover and running around the house. Parker followed him, abandoning the plan without a moment of thought. Stupid to split up. Stupid.

Parker sprinted after Eliot, hugging shadows out of instinct. She realized she was whispering as she ran. She was saying, “Hardison. Hardison.”

She rounded the corner of the house just in time to see Eliot tear another man off Hardison and hurl him away. Hardison staggered back, and Parker dragged him into a corner of Livingston’s house and held him there with her body.

“I’m okay,” Hardison gasped. It was too dark to see his expression. When she ran her fingers along his face, he flinched. There was sticky wetness on his cheek.

“You’re bleeding.”

Eliot’s growl was a steady, constant thing in her ear, but other than that, the fight was virtually soundless.

“He’s not Livingston’s security.” Hardison’s lips brushed Parker’s hand when he spoke. “No uniform.”

“Eliot, get that guy to tell you what’s going on here,” Parker said. Her plan was ruined before it had even begun.

Six minutes until the next security patrol.

Eliot didn’t acknowledge her. He was a blur of shadows, a dark thing.

He flipped the guy onto the ground hard and normally that’s where Eliot would have stopped. Disable the threat, ask the questions, get out.

But instead, Eliot put his boot on the guy’s neck and shifted to bring all his weight down. The guy rolled, barely managing to dislodge Eliot before he could snap his neck.

Eliot wasn’t trying to disable.

“Parker, what is going on?” Hardison was keeping as quiet as the fight, everyone mindful of not alerting the security guards.

“Eliot’s going to kill that guy, I think.”

Parker had only seen Eliot kill once before. Chapman would have hurt a lot of people if they hadn’t stopped him. If Eliot was killing this guy, she didn’t doubt for a second that he had a good reason.

This person, whoever he was, had hurt Hardison. If Eliot wanted him dead, she didn’t see why she should argue.

“Wait, no, this isn’t right.” Hardison pushed her away, trying to get a better view.

“Eliot knows what he’s doing.”

“No, that’s what I’m saying, I don’t think he does. He doesn’t feel normal. Something’s wrong.”

The guy grunted in pain and Parker heard a quiet snap of bone. Eliot was completely silent now.

“Eliot,” Hardison said into the comms. He turned to Parker, desperately. “He doesn’t want to do this, I can feel it. Parker, stop him. _Eliot_.”

Eliot’s stride faltered. Only for a second. But it was enough for Parker to recognize the strange jerky quality to his movements that always accompanied the lack of awareness in his eyes.

Even with Chapman, Eliot had hesitated to kill. If Parker was being honest with herself, she knew that Eliot didn’t want to kill anybody—not really. Hardison was right, this was all wrong.

Four minutes to the next patrol.

The guy was on the ground again and Eliot was a whirlwind of motion above him. Eliot was hard to pin down, he was moving so fast.

Parker risked raising her voice. “Eliot! Stop!”

Again, that split-second hesitation that looked like relief. Parker stretched out her hands and reached out with her mind. She drew Eliot away from the fight careful and slow, because he and Hardison were the most important things her powers could ever touch. Parker was not going to hurt Eliot. Not ever again.

She and Hardison rushed out from their cover and each looped an arm around him. Parker didn’t want to use her powers any longer than necessary. Eliot strained against them to get back to the fight, but not as hard as he could have. Their hands were enough to hold him.

“Was that right?” Parker was consumed with her need to know. It couldn’t wait. “Eliot? Did I do the right thing?”

“Yes,” Eliot gritted out. “I don’t know why—just like before. _Dammit_. Is Quinn alive?”

“Quinn?” Hardison said, surprised. “Hang on, you know this guy?”

The guy—Quinn—was struggling to his feet. He wheezed out a pained laugh. “Good to see you too, pal.”

There were footsteps coming towards them. The next patrol.

“We’ve got to go,” Parker said, pulling Eliot and Hardison towards their secondary exit.

“Bring Quinn,” Eliot said. “Drag him if he can’t walk. And don’t let me kill him.”

 

 

* * * *

 

The Livingston mansion was out in the country, surrounded by miles of Vermont forest, so their escape route led them into the woods.

Eliot led them through the blackness of the forest. Hardison had no idea how he knew where he was going.

Parker had taken Eliot seriously about dragging the Quinn guy along. She was actually dragging him, using her powers to keep him upright when he stumbled, clutching his side. Quinn’s emotions were harsh and almost garishly bright. Hardison did a quick skim read and got neon flashes of _fear_ and _annoyance_ , with _desire_ smothering it all like too much cologne. Hardison retreated hastily and put up his shields.

No one talked.

Eliot was less of a shifting, sliding mess inside now that he was away from Quinn. Hardison couldn’t help bumping into Eliot accidentally-on-purpose as he scrambled along behind him. These weird blank-outs were starting to get scary. When Hardison tripped over some inconveniently placed nature for the second time, Eliot grabbed him by the arm and didn’t let go.

(Hardison couldn’t remember the last time Eliot had touched him without it being an invitation to something else.)

It took a few minutes for Hardison to calm down enough to realize there was another reason he was feeling so freaked. There was some kind of incessant humming in the back of his head, the kind that could resolve into words if he lowered his shields and paid attention.

Quinn. It had to be coming from him. Great. Another telepath from Eliot’s past.

Still, Hardison had always had more curiosity than caution. When they were far enough away for Eliot to slow their pace, Hardison lowered his shields. He ignored Quinn’s emotions and tapped into the thoughts the telepath was projecting.

_—fucking goddamn ribs Eliot tried to kill me no surprise there and he’s hot when he does it always so fucking hot—_

“Cut it out,” Eliot growled. He didn’t even bother to look back at Quinn.

“What the _hell_?” Hardison demanded. He tried to spin around, but Eliot still had a grip on his arm. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“What’s he doing?” Parker asked.

“Easy, empath,” Quinn said. His voice was hoarse. “I can’t help it.”

“Get out of Eliot’s head,” Hardison demanded.

Parker’s voice was a snarl. “I will break both your legs and pull apart your arms.”

That overpowering _desire_ grew in Quinn’s emotions. It was nothing like Eliot’s _want_ , which was straightforward and honest. Quinn’s emotions were trying too hard—an insecure seventh-grader on his first date.

— _and wow that’s hot how does Eliot find these people what the hell do they get up to—_

 “What?” Hardison screeched.

Eliot said, “Quinn. You got a death wish you ain’t telling me about?”

“You broke one of my ribs,” Quinn protested. “Not exactly the ideal situation for control, Spencer.”

They made it out of the woods just then, the trees cut back to make way for a dirt service road. Hardison had bought a van for this job, because Eliot’s car was awesome, but it couldn’t hold all the equipment they needed. Lucille was waiting for them right where he’d parked her, blending in with the blackness.

Eliot let go of Hardison and clicked on a flashlight. The glow lit their faces from underneath, but Hardison was pretty sure that wasn’t the only thing making Quinn look sinister. He was someone with violence splashed all over him, down to the way he stood. Hardison’s throbbing face was proof enough of that. He was tall, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, his light hair pulled back in a bun.

Parker was circling, a cat with its back up. The furious, terrified way she moved reminded Hardison of that very first day, with Eliot unconscious on their couch in Portland.

Hardison was pretty sure that Quinn was the kind of man Parker had expected Eliot to be.

Sure enough, Parker said, “I don’t want this guy here. Make him tell us why he ruined our plan and get him out.”

“You brought me,” Quinn reminded. “I never asked to be dragged along, I had my own extraction.”

Eliot pointed the flashlight in Quinn’s face. “Why don’t you tell us about that? Pal.”

“You know you’re happy to see me. Deep, deep down. And I’m on a job. I’m not giving up my client, it’s unprofessional.”

“What’s your objective?” Eliot asked.

— _Eliot get the girl Eliot get the girl—_

“You’re after Olivia?” Hardison didn’t even need Quinn’s frustration to tell him he was right.

Eliot took one very threatening step closer. “You better be hired for a different kind of job than you usually do.”

Hardison tapped Eliot’s shoulder in a gentle reminder. “You don’t want to kill him.”

Quinn’s emotions turned violently hostile, blood soaking through everything in a way that had Hardison’s mind cringing away. “For fuck’s sake, Eliot. Again?”

“Stay out of it, Quinn.”

“How do you know this guy?” Parker’s circling had taken her out of Eliot’s flashlight, but Hardison knew by her voice that she had wound herself up and up, as tight as she could.

“We worked together,” Eliot said. “Moreau.”

Parker’s control snapped. Hardison actually felt it, a furious explosion.

Quinn slammed back against the van, held by Parker’s powers with his arms pinned above his head. She had that scary, frozen smile that meant she wasn’t seeing the person in front of her as quite real.

“Calm down,” Eliot said sharply.

“You were there?” Parker asked Quinn.

His mouth didn’t answer her, but his brain did.

_—Eliot Spencer beautiful damn disaster can’t push too hard his mind is always a freefall—_

Hardison’s rage swelled up to meet Parker’s. This guy had used Eliot and then left him with Damien Moreau.

(Used Eliot like a thing. Dammit, dammit…)

Hardison shouldered himself in front of Eliot the way Eliot usually did to him. He needed to keep Eliot safe from—from—

“He was in Eliot’s head,” Hardison said. He didn’t recognize his voice. It was low and full of something that made Quinn’s eyes widen.

Parker squeezed her fist and Quinn choked.

“Both of you stop,” Eliot said, strained. “We don’t want to kill him, remember?”

“Not anymore,” Parker said.

“I’m reconsidering,” Hardison said.

“Why are you trying to kidnap our psychic kid?” Parker opened her hand and Quinn took a deep breath. He didn’t say anything, and his brain was just noise.

“How could you do that to another person?” Hardison was consumed with the need to make Quinn feel some of what Eliot must have felt: a presence in his head he hadn’t actually wanted, someone hurting him.

Quinn sucked in another breath and said, “Like you have a fucking leg to stand on, _empath_. Like you don’t do the exact same thing.”

The words ripped through Hardison like shards of ice.

Eliot was angry. “Quinn I swear to god—”

“You hurt him,” Hardison said. His lips felt numb.

Quinn said, “I didn’t know.”

Hardison was up in his face before he’d realized he was moving. Quinn was frozen against the hard metal, eyes shifting away. Hardison balled up his fists and pressed them against Quinn’s chest.

“You didn’t want to know.”

And then Hardison shoved all his self-recrimination and regret and bone-deep grief straight into Quinn’s head.

Quinn’s mouth opened in a soundless cry and Hardison was glad.

(He deserved this. He deserved more than this.)

Strong arms wrapped around him from behind and pulled him back. But Hardison wasn’t done, so he struggled to get free.

“Hardison.” Eliot’s voice was grounding and immediate next to his ear. Eliot was holding him so securely that Hardison could feel the words rumbling against him. “Hardison, don’t do that.”

Eliot’s flashlight was on the ground, lighting a path right to Quinn. Parker had apparently let him go, because he was slumped against the van, fisting his hands in his hair. Quinn’s breathing was loud and panicked. He was staring blankly into space, trapped in the chaos Hardison had driven into his head. Hardison could hear a low hum of pain in Quinn’s thoughts.

— _it hurts what is happening my god it hurts it hurts it hurts—_

Hardison knew he had to fix it: take away the emotions he’d pushed, apologize, and then maybe go lobotomize himself. But first he just needed a second to get himself together. Eliot had him. It was okay for Hardison to wilt against him, to let all his muscles weaken with the knowledge of what he’d just done. Eliot had him.

“I’m sorry,” Hardison said, knowing he had to say it. Knowing it didn’t matter.

Eliot just tightened his grip. He was swirling with concern.

“Hardison?” Parker made his name into something uncertain. It was too dark to see her expression, but her body language was wary. It made Hardison want to cry, seeing that caution directed at him. “Pushing is bad.”

Parker said it like a test. She was standing farther away from Hardison than she normally did. Eliot still wasn’t letting him go, and Hardison was starting to wonder why.

“Yes,” Hardison said. The word tasted like burnt toast. “Of course it is and I know that. I just got so damn angry at me. And at Quinn. It doesn’t matter, I know it’s no excuse.”

Parker didn’t look satisfied. An unyielding certainty was growing in Eliot that hadn’t been there before.

“Eliot?” Hardison asked.

“You shouldn’t have done that.” Eliot said it more firmly than Hardison had heard him say anything since Boston.

“I know,” Hardison whispered. He was glad he couldn’t see either of their faces, grateful to the darkness.

Eliot let him go, steadying him as he drew back. “Get rid of whatever you pushed.”

“He’s right,” Parker said. “Make it better.”

Hardison was desperate to fix it. He started forward, but Eliot’s hand snapped around his arm again. “Careful, he’ll hurt you.”

“I think we’ve established that I’m the one who hurts people, and wow, how did my life turn into the mirror-verse without me noticing?”

“Do it from here,” Eliot said. “Don’t touch him.”

Maybe getting punched would help with the guilt. But Eliot wasn’t going to let him get close, and honestly, Hardison didn’t actually relish the idea of being punched twice in the same night.

“It might take a little longer,” Hardison said, apologetically.

Parker moved away from him to hover on the sidelines. “Just do it.”

She hadn’t forgiven him.

(It made Hardison feel like he was fracturing into pieces, but maybe that was how he should be feeling right now.)

Hardison closed his eyes and reached out to Quinn’s mind. It was so loud. Everything smelled like blood. Hardison took a deep breath and waded in, pushing away the confusion and anger that were Quinn’s own reactions to what Hardison had given him. Hardison could see his intrusions rubbed into Quinn’s mind like a handful of powdered glass. He picked them out, one at a time, and got out of Quinn’s head as quickly as possible.

When he opened his eyes, there was a car coming down the service road. Eliot and Parker were in the middle of rapid-fire conversation.

“Can’t be forest rangers, headlights are too close together.”

“We have to go, Eliot. Bring Hardison!”

“They’ve seen us already. We need to deal with it.”

Quinn had picked himself up again, standing as straight as his ribs would let him. His laugh was a shaky, shattered thing. Hardison had made it that way.

“Well, Eliot, you asked about my employer.”

 

 

 

The car pulled up right beside Lucille, the headlights bathing the entire area in bright light. A short man in a suit stepped out of the car. He did not look particularly happy.

“My, my. Look at what we have here.”

The guy’s British accent managed to carry an air of smugness, even in that one short sentence.

“Listen, Sterling—” Quinn began.

Sterling held up a hand. “I’m getting it loud and clear, Mr. Quinn, thank you. My telepathy is actually quite deft.”

Hardison looked to Parker for cues, but Parker was looking to Eliot, and Eliot was motionless. Waiting.

“Here’s an interesting thing,” Sterling said. He paced closer to them, completely ignoring his employee. His eyes were locked onto Hardison. “Damien Moreau ends up in prison and no one is quite sure how it happened. Every psychic I know is talking about it. The criminal underworld is abuzz. All anyone seems to know for sure is that Eliot Spencer was there, with an empath holding his leash.” Sterling tipped his head toward Eliot. “Obviously a mind like this can only be Spencer’s. So empath, can I assume that I am making the acquaintance of someone rather infamous?”

“I’m sorry, what?” Hardison asked. His brain still felt fuzzy and dammit, he had been planning to curl up in the back of Lucille for at least twelve hours of exile. Now all the sudden he had a condescending telepath arching an eyebrow at him like the two of them were part of the same secret club.

Hardison was starting to hate psychics.

Eliot had reached some kind of decision. He planted himself in front of Hardison and spoke to Sterling, cool and professional. “You don’t speak to him until I search you.”

Sterling rolled his eyes and lifted his arms. “All of you criminal types are so paranoid. Honestly.”

Eliot patted him down with detached efficiency while Hardison’s mind whirled.

What. Was. Happening.

He glanced at Parker, who looked just as lost as he felt.

Eliot stepped back, apparently satisfied. He kept giving his head little shakes, like he was shooing away a fly.

Hardison knew what that meant, at least. He was about to do something about it when Eliot spoke.

“You’ve got your fingers all over something that ain’t yours.” Eliot’s voice was an easy threat. “I’d expect an insurance investigator to be more respectful of personal property.”

“It’s fascinating,” Sterling muttered. “Most people were sure Moreau used drugs, but your mind is all natural, isn’t it?”

“I don’t work for Moreau,” Eliot said, calmly. “I work for the guy who destroyed Moreau in less than four hours. If you want this meeting to be mutually advantageous, I suggest you think real hard before touching his stuff.”

“My apologies,” Sterling said. To Hardison. “I should have asked you, but sometimes my curiosity just…sweeps me away.”

Hardison just stared.

“ _Alec_ ,” Eliot said. “He’s clean. Okay?”

Hardison finally understood. Alec was Evil Empath Hardison. Honestly, Hardison couldn’t think of any role he would less rather play right now, with the horror of what he’d done to Quinn shivering in the back of his mind.

But Eliot had to have a good reason for choosing this particular angle, and if he trusted Hardison to play it, Hardison would trust him back.

Parker was still and silent. She was following Eliot’s lead and letting them run the show.

“Okay,” Hardison said.

Eliot moved back to him, like Hardison’s voice was a lead around his neck. Every movement held a kind of checked power, coiled but not volatile. It looked impressive—and Hardison saw Sterling be impressed.

Eliot took a position beside and slightly behind Hardison. He dropped his gaze like it was his pleasure. And just like that, regardless of the actual truth, Eliot had turned Hardison into the most dangerous person present.

Sterling’s tone was more conciliatory when he said, “I’m Jim Sterling, Olivia’s father. Perhaps we got off on the wrong foot.”

(This, right here, was why Moreau had done it.)

Eliot gave Hardison the courage to stand straighter and put distain into his voice when he said, “Well, I’m Alec Hardison. Why was your guy trying to break into the Livingston house?”

“I believe we have a common goal.”

“How do you know what our goal is?”

Sterling smiled. It was speculative, almost cruel. “Spencer’s mind really is as advertised. Honestly I didn’t believe the rumors until now, but I’ve never seen anything like it. How did Moreau do it? I assume you got Spencer to show you.”

Hardison figured it wasn’t blowing his cover to get offended, so he didn’t even try to stop himself. “We’re leaving.”

“Wait!” Sterling said. “You ruined my plan.”

“Actually, you ruined our plan. And she’s your daughter, I’m pretty sure you’ve got it covered,” Hardison said.

“I did. But you didn’t finish your hack and the system registered it as a breach. Livingston’s security will be on high alert. Also, Spencer damaged my hitter. This was supposed to be a simple in and out, but thanks to you, it’s become more complicated.”

“Not my problem.”

“Don’t you want to save the girl?”  There was a hint of desperation in Sterling’s tone that erased the earlier smugness.

And yes, Hardison did. He knew the others did too. But something about Sterling had Eliot spooked enough to pull this kind of grift, and Hardison figured that was a good reason to get out and let someone else handle it.

Just to make sure, he glanced at Parker. She gave him a tiny nod. Eliot was a steady stream of wariness and anxiety—he didn’t want to be here either.

Unanimous vote.

“She’s your girl,” Hardison said, feeling a little bad, but confident it was the right call. “And you seem like a smart guy. You’ll save her yourself.” He turned towards Lucille.

“Spencer blanks out on you, doesn’t he?” Sterling asked, quickly.

(Almost made it.)

Shock rippled out from Eliot.

“I saw it in Quinn’s head, as well as your boy’s. I know why. I know how to fix it.”

Eliot moved closer and rested two fingers secretly on the inside of Hardison’s wrist. For weeks, he’d had been using his touch to draw Hardison into his mind. Not now. This time, Eliot wasn’t pulling Hardison deeper, he was offering his surface emotions, like Hardison always got from Eliot anyway, only more precise and clear.

_Curiosity. Eagerness._

Eliot wanted to hear what Sterling had to say, and he was communicating with Hardison in a language telepaths couldn’t speak.

“What do you know about that?” Hardison said.

Sterling, unfortunately, had his smugness back. “A great deal, actually. That kind of trigger is usually put in place by an empath and telepath working together.”

Eliot’s grim acknowledgement told Hardison that Sterling could be telling the truth.

“And it can be fixed?”

“If you and your team agree to assist me in rescuing my daughter, I would be happy to provide you with the proper knowledge.”

Eliot had the same wistful quality he’d felt while watching Hardison and Parker banter back and forth—that delicate rustle of love letters on old paper. Getting it in such a concentrated dose, Hardison realized now that it was _longing_.

Eliot never asked for anything for himself. Ever. But he was asking now, wordless and steady.

In case there was any confusion, Eliot tapped Hardison’s wrist insistently.

“That sounds like a fair trade,” Hardison said. “We’ll meet you here an hour after sunset to iron out the details. Does that work for you?” He lowered his mental shields to about half their strength. “You can see how serious I am, if you don’t trust me.”

Sterling’s powers flicked over Hardison’s mind. “I’m satisfied. As for my end of the bargain…”

Hardison was suddenly thinking about triggers. He knew what triggers were, a deadly combination of powers that linked a certain thought with an emotional response. The links were small, hard to spot, but once you found them all you needed to do was break them. And now Hardison knew what he was looking for.

“I’ve snapped triggers before,” Sterling said. “Easy as breaking a bone. I can do Spencer for you, if you like.”

Eliot’s refusal screamed through Hardison.

“No thank you.”

“Suit yourself. It’s good thing you have Parker as your telekinetic, Alec. The last time I did this, we had to strap the bastard down.” Sterling’s amusement had a definite hint of malicious glee when he looked at Eliot. “Mutually advantageous indeed. I look forward to working with you tomorrow.”

 

* * * *

 

 

As soon as Sterling and Quinn drove away and the darkness swallowed their car’s taillights, Eliot was herding Parker and Hardison into the van. He was careful not to touch them now that he didn’t have to—his body was misfiring at an increasingly alarming rate.

“We aren’t going to do what Sterling was talking about,” Hardison said.

“Later.” Eliot scooped up the flashlight off the ground. “Sterling is a telepath on Chapman’s level. He would have taken us all out if he thought he could get away with it.”

“You made him think he couldn’t,” Parker said. “That was cool. You should teach me.”

Eliot’s body was safer controlled, but everything inside him twisted at thought of Parker leashed and muzzled. Even on a grift. Even for Hardison.

“No. Both of you get in the van.”

When she climbed in, Parker gave Hardison a wider berth than she usually did. Eliot saw Hardison notice and shrink in on himself. Hardison tried to take the driver’s seat, but Eliot snatched the keys.

“Sit in the back with Parker.”

Hardison looked trapped. “I don’t think she—”

“Sit in the back.”

It was the first time Eliot had seen them not completely comfortable around each other. It was unsettling to watch them awkwardly fold themselves into opposite ends of the bench seat while trying to hide what they were doing.

Eliot started up the van and drove quietly until he reached a paved road. Then he turned on the headlights and gunned it.

He felt sharper than he had in days. Eliot’s senses were on high alert, taking in every detail around him, storing and cataloguing.

He’d almost killed Quinn.

He’d seen Hardison lose himself.

He’d conned a telepath and won.

Eliot had so much fight-or-flight energy itching through him right now, he could barely keep still in his seat. He relished the keenness of his mind while clamping down hard on his body. He gripped the steering wheel tightly, just in case the autopilot in his head decided to click on again.

“How long did you know Quinn?” Parker asked.

That wasn’t what she actually wanted to know, and Eliot was impressed with her tact.

“Couple of days. Maybe a week.” He checked the mirrors. There was no one on the road with them. “Moreau hired him one night, security for one of his parties.”

God, those parties. Eliot had done bloody, gruesome things, but if he could scrub any memories, those parties would be the first to go.

Parker was still waiting for the answer to the question she hadn’t asked. Eliot might want to forget that time but he didn’t necessarily want to forget Quinn. She needed to understand.

“We’d been in Europe for months. I was so sick of all those bastards.”

“Snobby money accents,” Parker said knowingly.

“Right. And then I hear this guy talking like he’s fresh from Alabama and I just—” Eliot had reacted to the sound of home in a stranger’s voice and hadn’t even thought before inviting the guy out for a beer. “Anyway. It was the first thing I’d wanted in a long time that Moreau hadn’t put in my head. So obviously he wasn’t too big on Quinn after that. I helped him get out. Haven’t seen him since.”

Parker sounded subdued. “Not one of the bad ones, then.”

“Don’t get me wrong, he’s a bad guy. Just not in the way you’re thinking.”

“I’m sorry I did what I did,” Parker said.

Hardison wasn’t talking at all—a quick check in the rearview mirror showed him pressed up against the door.

“People make mistakes,” Eliot said, trying to say the words right to him. “And when it’s people like us, those mistakes get messy real fast.”

“It wasn’t a mistake.” When Hardison finally spoke, there was self-loathing in his voice that Eliot had never, ever wanted to hear. “It was a choice. My choice.”

“Choices can be mistakes. Trust me, I’ve made lots of them.”

“Not like me. I hurt people! _My_ mistakes can really hurt people, Eliot!”

It was such a ridiculous, stupid thing for Hardison to say to him that Parker said, “Um…”

Eliot knew he didn’t deserve it, but he would always love that these two didn’t look at him and see the blood and violence that hung around him. Now, however, it was defeating his point.

“Hardison,” he said, as gently as he could. He kept his eyes on the road and waited for Hardison’s brain to catch up with his mouth.

“It’s—I just mean—what you do isn’t the same.”

“It’s not,” Eliot agreed. “But it’s not better, either.”

“I don’t know what to do.” Hardison sounded cracked open. “Not about Quinn, though I am sorry about that, again. About these last few weeks with you and me. The things I’ve done, I don’t know what to _do_ with them. Parker,” he said desperately, “you said you messed up bad before. What do you do with it?”

“I don’t know.” Parker sounded just as upset. “All I know is that I keep messing up. I keep telling you both to do the wrong things. Tonight I almost strangled a guy Eliot liked and my plan got you hurt!”

The despair in their voices was all the more brutal because he hadn’t expected it.

Eliot had been distracted recently. Off his game, even. But now he was running on two good nights of sleep and lots of post-job adrenaline. His brain was settling more with every passing day, the terrible _want_ receding and giving him his real emotions back. And so, finally, Eliot actually saw the situation in front of him.

His people were a mess.

Parker was fraying around the edges and Hardison was a warzone.

They’d become so strong. Eliot had forgotten how innocent they’d been until he had shown up and gotten them ready to fight a war. He had blown out the walls of their world and dragged them into his, and then assumed they knew how to handle it.

They clearly didn’t.

 _Dammit_.

Eliot moved the van onto the shoulder and put it in park. He got out, ignoring their startled questions. He opened the sliding door and ducked inside to join them in the back before slamming it shut behind him.

At least they were sitting close to each other again, holding hands like they were both falling.

They’d made enough space for him to perch on the edge of the seat.

“Eliot?” Parker asked, cautious.

 Hardison was pulling back. “Oh, please not right now. I can’t. Eliot, say you’re not going southern comfort on us.”

“I told you not to call it that,” Eliot said, making the words irritable to reassure them.

It worked, slightly. The light in the van had come on when Eliot had opened the door, and they both looked wan and kind of sick.

“Well, that’s something, at least,” Hardison muttered.

The backseat of the van wasn’t all that roomy with three people trying to share one seat. Parker was jammed against the other window, and Hardison and Eliot’s legs tangled together despite Hardison’s best efforts. Eliot’s _want_ tried to assert itself again, but Eliot could beat it back now. Parker and Hardison needed him.

“After Chapman, you said our downsides were what made us _us_.” Eliot pointed to Hardison. He pointed to Parker. “And you said we could change, all of us together. You both still believe that?”

“I’m pretty sure we changed into something worse,” Hardison said.

Parker nodded.

“Then we’ll change again,” Eliot said. “You want to know what I do with it all? The stuff I’ll never be clean of?”

They both looked like they were going to argue with him on that point, so he said, “Don’t. You have no idea what I’ve done.”

They were both leaning towards him, like his words were going to save them. It was terrifying and exhilarating, right on the verge of being too much.

“You’re not just the worst thing you’ve done,” Eliot said, roughly. “Own it, whatever it is. Then make it something you don’t do anymore.”

“That sounds too easy,” Parker said, doubtfully.

“It’s not.”

“I think it sounds hard,” Hardison said.

Parker squeezed his hand tighter. “We’ll do it together. We’ll help each other. Right?” This last part was directed to Eliot.

“Right.”  

He wanted his hands on them, both of them, with a suddenness that took him by surprise. It was nothing like that poisonous _want_ leeching from his broken brain. It was a clean, uncomplicated desire to remind himself that they were with him.

It was becoming increasingly obvious over the past few days that they really were with him.

 _We like you_ , they’d said, first in words, then in every action they’d taken over the past few days. Not his body, not his brain, not his skills. Something that both transcended and unified all of those things.

Eliot was wavering on the edge of believing them, a jump that made his last freefall look like nothing.

It didn’t matter anyway. His hands hadn’t exactly been reliable recently—seducing and punching without his permission. His hands would be rightly unwelcome. So he clenched them tightly and kept his touch to himself.

 

 

Hardison had found them a little house about thirty minutes from Olivia’s mansion, some vacation cottage for people who wanted to spend the summer in upstate Vermont.

It had roses growing up the outside of one wall and a passable herb garden. There were two bedrooms with king sized beds and a pullout couch from the seventies. The whole place smelled like growing things and dust.

Eliot liked it.

Parker and Hardison held hands as they waked into the cottage, like kids in a damn fairytale. Parker made a grab for Eliot too, but he dodged her and fell into step behind them.

Once inside, Hardison tugged Parker into the tiny kitchen. “Food,” he said. “I need my hand back, girl. These leftovers aren’t going to reheat themselves.”

“We can do it like this.”

“We could also drop our dinner all over this shiny wood floor. It’s the only dinner we got and I’m not feeling inclined to take risks.”

“We’ll help each other,” Parker said, and Hardison caved.

Between Parker’s right hand and Hardison’s left, they managed to dump the chicken parmigiana they’d ordered last night onto a big plate. They only dropped a little spaghetti on the floor. Hardison snorted. Parker smiled.

Eliot leaned against the wall of the kitchen and watched them.

His body might be blanking out on him, but his emotions were more or less his again. After days of not feeling anything, his emotions had been coming back to him in sharp explosions, like a bite of chili pepper.

The ache inside him wasn’t from any sort of empath withdrawal—it was from _them_. It didn’t make sense to feel homesick for Parker and Hardison. They were right there. But it was the closest word Eliot could find for the sweet sadness in his chest.

Hardison glanced over at him, but all he said was, “Feel like opening the microwave, wise sensei of wisdom?”

They could do it themselves and yes, that was exactly what Eliot felt like doing.

“You aren’t a sensei of something. It’s a title.”

The kitchen was small, and he brushed past Parker’s arm when he popped the microwave door open and watched the two of them carefully place the plate inside. They didn’t both have to be holding an edge. It wasn’t like the plate was heavy.

“You are wise, though,” Parker said. She watched Eliot close the door with a pleased expression.

Eliot punched three minutes into the microwave and didn’t say anything.

“You are,” Parker insisted. She bumped against him gently. She’d been very gentle with him over the past few days—more like the way she touched Hardison, like she had considered the possibility that his body could break and found that possibility unacceptable.

No one touched him like that.

“She’s right,” Hardison said. He was watching the chicken parmigiana spin around and around. “Thanks for what you said. It helped. And I’m pretty sure it’ll keep helping, so thanks in advance.”

Parker’s fingers brushed against Eliot’s hand. Eliot knew he should pull away from her, because his hands had almost killed someone tonight.

He didn’t. Eliot had never lied to himself about being a good man.

“It’s not wisdom, it’s just experience,” he said.

Hardison rejected his gambit for an argument. “Whatever it is, we need a healthy heaping of it.”

“I told you,” Parker said. “We just need you to be _Eliot_.”

The ache in Eliot’s chest grew.

Hardison shifted uneasily. He could tell Eliot what the ache meant. He could dive into his head and make him forget all about it. But Hardison had said he wouldn’t, and he hadn’t.

With Moreau, the absence of readings had left him scrambling for his footing on a sheet of ice. Eliot had never thought that the lack of readings could make him feel secure. But after the fire in his head had died down, that’s exactly how he’d been feeling. Hardison’s resolve not to do readings was something Eliot felt like he could lean against with all his strength.

In fact, Eliot had. He’d put his best work into getting Hardison to give in and Hardison hadn’t.

That had never happened before.

Ever.

The microwave dinged, announcing dinner.

Parker apparently decided her little team-building exercise was done, because she released Hardison’s hand to rip open the silverware drawer. “Eliot gets the biggest fork!”

They stood around in the kitchen, eating off the one plate because apparently Parker and Hardison had been raised by wolves.

“This is not how you eat dinner.” Eliot was balancing the plate on one hand and twirling spaghetti with his fork. “What would your nanna say?”

“My nanna would say there were two less plates to wash. And I, for one, agree with her.” Hardison crowded close and started cutting the pasta.

Eliot knocked his fork away with his own. “Don’t do that. Twirl it.”

“I don’t twirl, I cut. I am a big proponent of spaghetti cutting.”

“What’s the point of long pasta if you’re just going to ruin it?”

“I’m not ruining it, I’m making it easier to eat!”

“ _Twirling_ makes it easier to eat!”

Parker’s fingers darted in and grabbed a piece of spaghetti off the plate. “Just slurp it,” she said, and then demonstrated. With gusto.

Eliot was pretty sure his face was mirroring Hardison’s expression of horror.

Parker smiled messily. “See? Like really long worms.”

“Okay, we’re done.” Eliot put the plate on the counter and snagged their forks.

Hardison made a grab for his, but he was laughing too hard to do much. Parker danced out of Eliot’s reach, but she wanted him to catch her and so he did.

“You,” Eliot said. He meant to follow that up with something peeved, but they were both grinning at him and nothing came to mind.

Really, there wasn’t much else to say.

“ _You_ ,” Parker said back, straight to him.

Hardison was too bright to look at. “Hey you.”

They were teasing him, but they also weren’t. It was part of the same story they’d been trying to tell over the past few days, a story where Eliot had a different role on their team than he’d thought. Their voices were full of invitation, welcoming him to the edge of the cliff.

It was too much, suddenly. He couldn’t jump. For so many reasons, he couldn’t.

“Tell me about triggers,” Eliot said. His words were harsh and out of context, but he couldn’t make them any other way.

Their smiles dimmed, the moment deflating.

“Oh,” Hardison said. “Right. Yeah. We should probably do that. Sorry, I know you’re dying to get them out of your head.”

Eliot’s words had put the tension back in Parker’s body and he was sorry about that. But Eliot had to talk about something concrete, something he was sure about.

“Sterling said it would hurt,” Parker said. “We’re not doing that.”

“She’s right,” Hardison said. “I am so sick of hurting you, man, you can’t imagine.”

There was a fight to be had about that, but it wasn’t the time. They would never accept his view of the situation anyway—his willingness to forgive them.

They didn’t understand. He had been helpless in the hands of people who had torn him apart knowingly, gleefully, and then recorded the results to be sure they could repeat them. Parker and Hardison had given him some clumsy bruises and then stopped the world to make it right.

“Just tell me what you know,” Eliot said. “We’ll start there.”

“Okay, sure. But I’m not doing it standing around in this kitchen. I can’t even look at that spaghetti now.”

 

 

The little house didn’t have much in the way of a living room and the couch wasn’t big enough for two people, let alone three. Hardison’s room was in wild disarray. So they ended up in the bedroom Parker had claimed for Eliot, because at least he knew how to make a bed and put away his clothes.

They all sat on Eliot’s bed in various states of tension. The last time Eliot and Hardison had been on a bed together, Eliot had come back to awareness with Hardison trapped and pleading for him to stop.

Eliot had been so sure he was dreaming, because he’d been having that nightmare since he’d met them. Usually he had blood on his hands and Parker was there. In his nightmares, he never stopped until he felt their life wink out under his hands.

“I would have killed Quinn tonight,” Eliot said. It wasn’t a confession because they knew already. It was a warning.

“You’ve never attacked us,” Hardison said, ignoring it. “Except for in the romantical sense, and that was just me. Huh. Never thought about that before, actually. You think your subconscious finds me more attractive than Parker? I think it finds me more attractive.”

Hardison was babbling and Eliot didn’t have patience for it right now. “The point is that I could do the same to you, we don’t know. And if I did. If I laid a finger on you two—”

Just the thought of bloodying Hardison or Parker was enough to choke him.

“I need you to tell me what you know,” Eliot said, finally.

Hardison looked distressed. His hand was hovering above Eliot’s knee, like he wanted to touch him but was afraid. “Okay. I’ll do my best. It’s hard to describe. Triggers are like...they’re like…Parker! Parker come here a second.”

Parker scooted obligingly close to him. “Triggers are like me?”

“No, they’re like _braids_.” Hardison took three locks of Parker’s soft hair. “Stimulus. Thought. Response.” He braided Parker’s hair smoothly as he talked. “Telepaths and empaths just have to pick the stimulus for the trigger, then they can attach it to whatever thought pattern and emotional response they want. They’re all wrapped around each other.”

“Sterling said to break them,” Eliot said.

Hardison ran his finger along Parker’s smooth braid. “I don’t know, man, there’s got to be another way. What he’s talking about would be like pulling the braid out by the roots.”

“No!” Parker said, though about the hair pulling or the de-triggering, Eliot wasn’t sure.

“If that’s what it takes,” Eliot said. Parker really would have to hold him down. It really would be like Belgrade.

Hardison frowned at Parker’s hair, frustrated. “Hang on, hang on. Just let me think.”

“Don’t think too long. We’ve got a job to do.”

“Don’t rush me! I do not think well under pressure, I get panicky, you know that.” Hardison ran his fingers gently through the braid in Parker’s hair and it unraveled, the strands slipping through his fingers. “Huh.”

He did the braid again, and Eliot spared a moment to notice that his dark fingers looked beautiful flashing through Parker’s bright hair.

Once again, Hardison unraveled the braid with a few light touches. “ _Huh._ ”

“You want to share with the class, Hardison?” Eliot demanded.

“There was this thing Nanna used to do for us kids,” Hardison said slowly. “Not a reading. Nothing like that. She wouldn’t go deep or change our emotions, she’d just kind of untangle them for us. She used to say she was brushing the knots out, and that’s what made me think of it.”

“Is it nice?” Parker asked.

“Nanna did it. For her _kids_ ,” Hardison repeated. “Of course it’s nice.”

A few days ago, Eliot would have tried to use this situation as an opportunity to get Hardison back inside his head for a reading. But that artificial urgency was gone, and these two were telling him that he still had a place. That different, new place that he couldn’t think about right now.

It had actually been a relief to know that Hardison wasn’t going to dive into his head at any given moment. Some part of him that was always on guard had been able to relax, just a bit.

 “If you do a reading and then stop again, I’ll be pretty useless for a couple days,” Eliot said, keeping his voice neutral.

Hardison gave him a look that said he could see right through him. “I’m taking your advice and making that something I don’t do anymore. I don’t know if Nanna’s way will work or not, but I’ll promise you one thing, it won’t be a reading. It won’t hurt.”

“That’s two things,” Parker said.

“Not really.” Hardison hadn’t looked away from Eliot.

“Can you show us what it feels like?” Parker asked. She’d twisted around to look at Hardison. She looked like she was trying to break an especially tricky safe, all concentration and speculative planning. “Without your powers?”

“Ooh, girl, you’re not the mastermind for nothing.”

“I’m the _thief_ ,” Parker said, more sharply than expected.

“What I mean is, yeah. Yeah, I can do that.”

All their care was starting to make Eliot embarrassed. Too much. They were always giving him too much. “Hardison, I believe you. Let’s just try.”

“Parker said.” Hardison ran his fingers through Parker’s hair, starting at the top of her head and slowly working his way down. “See? Like a head massage.”

“That’s good. Eliot likes that.” Parker pulled away from Hardison and got up on her knees so she could look Eliot hard in the face. “Right? You liked it when I touched your hair before.”

“Parker, that’s not something you—.”

“That’s right, isn’t it?” Parker was getting agitated. “I got it right?”

These people were going to kill him.

“Yes,” Eliot ground out. “But you don’t ask people stuff like that unless you’re, you know.”

Parker clearly didn’t know. “Huh?”

“I mean that it’s personal.”

“We are personal,” Parker said. “With each other.”

She was kneeling in his space on a bed, so close that her emphatic gestures brushed against him. Eliot was flustered but he wasn’t actually nervous. His body was still resting easily, his legs crossed under him. He supposed she had a point.

“Let me show you what it’ll feel like,” Parker said. “Okay?”

He could fight her, but he wanted what she was offering. Parker’s touch never meant anything other than what she said it did.

He ducked his head to give her better access. “Someday Hardison is going to have a good long conversation with you and clarify some things.”

“Why does it have to be me?”  

“Because I said so.” And because it would be hilarious.

Parker’s nimble fingers combed through his hair. Her hands were quick and light, just the right amount of pressure. “Like it?”

“It’s just fine,” Eliot said, knowing she’d hear what he didn’t want to say out loud.

He’d liked a lot of things, before Moreau. But those fourteen months had turned touch into a warning signal for someone pushing into his head. Moreau had demanded absolute exclusivity unless he gave the okay, which he never gave unless psychics were involved. Eliot had gone over a year with physical contact meaning pain.

He’d been getting it back slowly. Toby had started slapping him on the back after the first month of cooking. A few weeks before Parker and Hardison, there had been a woman—clever and funny and not looking for anything more than one night. It had felt like reclaiming another piece of himself.

Letting Parker touch him like this felt similar.

So yes. Yes, he liked it.

Eliot could have sat there for hours letting that feeling soak into his skin, so he pulled away from Parker gently. “Okay, Hardison. Let’s do this.”

Hardison was all twisted around himself in a way that couldn’t be comfortable. “Oh joy.”

Parker tumbled to a sitting position, bouncing on the mattress. “You showed us what it’s like. It’ll be fine.”

“Uh huh. Because nothing’s ever gone wrong with me and Eliot doing empath stuff before, no, that would be ridiculous to even consider! I’m sure it’ll be sunshine and rainbows.”

Eliot pitched his voice down in the way that always calmed Hardison. “What would make this okay for you?”

“For _me_? What on god’s green earth makes you think this is about _me_?”

“Your hands are shaking.”

“They—” Hardison looked down. “They are, I’ll grant you that.”

“Fix it or walk away.” Eliot crossed his arms defensively when Hardison stared at him. “That’s the rules of the list, right?”

Parker squeezed his arm in a short, happy squeeze. “Yep.”

“So?” Eliot said, staring Hardison down.

“I mean, I guess I just need to be sure it’s something you want.”

“You know I do.”

“I know you want something. Damned if I know what.”

Eliot found the words easier to say than he’d expected. “I want to be in control of my body again. And I can’t have anyone other than you in my head.”

“See? That’s good to know. And, um.” Hardison looked like he was the one having trouble finding words. “It’s really tough when you guys—what I’m trying to say is—both of you, please don’t pressure me. To keep going. If I don’t want to.”

The words tingled through Eliot’s body like Hardison had slipped poison into his blood.

Hardison held up his hands. “It’s fine, it’s cool, we’re all cool now. Ain’t no big thing. But since you’re asking.”

Eliot had the irrational impulse to wrestle Hardison down and check every inch of him, as if other confessions would be stamped like bruises onto his skin.

“We won’t,” he said.

“We promise.” Parker sounded like she’d eaten the same poison he had.

Relief softened the tight clench of Hardison’s shoulders. “Thanks. Okay. Okay. Let’s do it.”

“How did Nanna do it?” Parker asked.

“Well, she was our nanna, so you know, probably shouldn’t apply the same—”

Parker frowned at him. “To get the desired results, follow exact procedure. I heard a scientist say that once when I was hiding in her lab.”

“Hardison, unless you don’t want to, just do it.” It wasn’t that Eliot was worried, exactly, but all this tiptoeing was making him jittery.

“Alright, well, turn around.” Hardison was already scooting closer, rumpling Eliot’s neatly-made bed.

Eliot turned to face the room. Parker was still beside him, sitting the opposite direction to watch Hardison.

Hardison rested his hands on Eliot’s back, palms flat. “Try to—”

“Don’t tell me to relax,” Eliot snapped.

“Then sit there all tense and grumpy. I’m sure that’ll make this better for everyone.” Hardison’s hands were rubbing slow circles on Eliot’s back.

“Are you even doing anything?”  

“I’m about to! Geeze. Give me a second.”

The warmth from Hardison’s hands was seeping through the thin material of Eliot’s t-shirt. It was the kind of touch Eliot had liked to lie down under and lose himself in before Moreau. Turned out he still liked it.

Hardison’s hands carefully never touched the back of his neck—never went higher than his shoulder blades.

“Here we go,” Hardison said. He sounded scared.

Eliot felt it immediately, a soft pressure that felt exactly like Parker’s fingers. Only more so.

Eliot’s eyes slipped shut. He barely stopped his sigh from escaping out loud.

“Eliot? Eliot, you’ve got to talk to me.” This definitely wasn’t a reading. If Hardison had been inside Eliot’s head, the panic in his voice would have been zipping through Eliot too.

“It’s fine,” Eliot said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Means it’s good. Means keep going.”

Parker pressed against his side. “Nice?”

“Just said so, didn’t I?”

He’d never felt anything quite like it. Hardison wasn’t even skimming from the surface of his mind—he was _on_ the surface. Nothing Eliot felt was being changed or tweaked. There was no one inside his mind except himself.

“I can see a trigger. Feel one. Whatever. It’s got Quinn all over it.” Hardison’s hands pushed a little more firmly into Eliot’s back. “I’m going to try something.”

It really did feel like Hardison was untangling a snarl in his hair, or maybe rubbing a knot out of his back. It felt healing. Then it stopped.

“Did you do it?”

“Are you kidding? This is going to take, like, an hour. That was just a practice. What do you think?”

Eliot opened his eyes and turned his head to look back at Hardison. “That’s all it’s going to be?”

“Yeah. That’s it.”

Eliot couldn’t stop the smile in the corner of his mouth. “If I fall asleep, I’m blaming you.”

Hardison gave him a hopeful little smile in return. “Sounds like a deal.”

“Quinn, huh?” Eliot turned back around and very carefully did not press against Hardison’s welcoming hands.

“Quinn and murder thoughts,” Hardison confirmed. “Looks like Moreau wanted to be sure you’d kill the guy next time you saw him.”

“Jealous bastard.” It was actually kind of funny to think about now, how obsessed Moreau had been.

Hardison’s careful touch was back in his head. “Someday I’m getting the juicy details of what happened between the two of you.”

Yeah, that was never going to happen. “Concentrate, Hardison.”

“Does that guy Quinn have a crush on Eliot?” Parker asked. “Sophie was telling me about crushes.”

“I think he might.” Hardison sounded way too happy about it. “He had Eliot’s haircut and everything, did you notice?”

“Shut up,” Eliot said. He bent his head to hide another twitch of his lips behind his hair.

“It helps if you’re thinking about the trigger stimulus,” Hardison said, innocently. “I need you to keep thinking about Quinn so I can work my mojo.”

“Maybe you should work your mojo and shut up.”

“Aw, don’t be like that. I bet he wanted to ask you to the hitter prom.”

“Is prom the one with dancing?” Parker asked, because of course she didn’t know.

“That’s the one,” Hardison said.

Parker flipped onto her back, her head almost in Eliot’s lap, but not quite. She wrinkled her nose up at him, which looked strange from that angle. “You wouldn’t take Quinn to prom.”

“No one is taking anyone to prom,” Eliot said, exasperated.

“I’m just saying. You’d take us.”

Eliot had a terrifying moment of imaging Parker trying to pin a buttonhole before he shut down that line of thought.

“Okay, sorry guys, but brain stuff is getting complicated now.” Hardison must have felt Eliot tense, because he smoothed his hands over Eliot’s back. “It’s all good. I just need that peace and quiet you were waxing lyrical about.”

Eliot and Parker shared a mutual moment of He Started It.

Without anything to distract him, Eliot let himself sink into how good everything felt. Moreau used to give him bliss. This wasn’t bliss. It was just comfort—Hardison patiently unraveling knots in his mind, Parker looking up at him, one hand under her head.

Parker’s stare was a little creepy, Eliot supposed, but he didn’t really mind. Because if she was staring, he could stare back. He sometimes felt as though he could look at these two forever and never get his fill.

Hardison did something that unsnagged something else in Eliot’s head, a tiny release of tension he hadn’t known was hurting until it was gone. His body melted a little, despite his best intentions, back into Hardison’s hands. Eliot closed his eyes.

Time passed, easy and languid.

Parker wiggled up close to him and rested her head on his leg. When Eliot opened his eyes, she looked sort of lonely, watching him and Hardison do something she’d never share. He was thankful that her mind was too locked down for psychics to destroy. But right now, she was looking at them like they were penny candy behind the counter and she was out of pennies.

Eliot wouldn’t have normally done it, but he was happy and peaceful and safe. So he reached out and ran his fingers through her hair, nice and slow. It meant, _This is what we’re doing. You’re part of it too._ She buried her face in his jeans, grateful and embarrassed about it.

The two of them had never needed words to communicate.

“Right, I think I’ve almost got it. If this actually works, you should feel it. You ready?”

Unlike Hardison.

“Ready.”

Hardison’s hands stilled and Eliot braced himself for pain.

Instead, he felt the tangle in his head dissolve, leaving only lightness behind. Eliot took a deep breath, more air in his lungs than he’d thought possible. He stretched his arms over his head because the space above him suddenly felt endless, like the world had gotten big enough for him to unfurl himself.

For Eliot, happiness had always been heavy, but he hadn’t realized he could feel this light.

“What did you do?”

Hardison said, “You sound happy. Are you happy? Did it work?”

Eliot twisted around and let Hardison see his smile. “What did you—this is— _Hardison_.”

Parker whooped, springing up to do a celebratory jump on the bed.

Hardison caught her when she jumped into his arms. He was laughing in pure relief.

Parker gave Hardison a dramatic, showy kiss on the top of his head. “You did it! You did the thing!”

Eliot laughed at the face Hardison made. The space in his head was freedom he’d forgotten he could have. It made room for laughter.

“Can you check for more?” Eliot asked.

Hardison grinned at him. “Man, I could do this all night.”

 

* * * *

 

Hardison found two more evil braids in Eliot’s head. One about protecting Moreau and another one Hardison called southern comfort.

“Empath withdrawal is the stimulus,” Hardison said about that last one, after Eliot had thrown a pillow at him. “That is really…”

“Pathetic?” Eliot suggested.

“Sick. It’s really sick. How many times did he—you know what, that ain’t none of my business, I’m sorry, ignore me.”

Parker had easily pieced together what Eliot had been like that time with Hardison. She was glad she hadn’t seen it. In the holding centers, some of the more powerful telepaths could get into other kids’ heads and make them do stuff. She’d tried not to watch them at night, the cold metal of the bunkbeds digging into her stomach when she curled up under her blanket.

“Get rid of that one first,” she ordered. Her memory kept giving her pictures of those kids, only they all had Eliot’s face. She flopped down and pushed her head into Eliot’s lap again. “Hurry.”

“Don’t hurry,” Eliot said. “But yeah, do that one first.”

He rested his hand on her head, comfortingly heavy. It settled her insides enough to make her memories fade. Instead, she thought about Eliot’s laughter and how it was becoming one of her favorite sounds.

The night passed, all of them quiet and restful while Hardison did his amazing empath magic. When Hardison got rid of the second braid, Eliot laughed again, and yep, Parker was sure of it now. Favorite sound. She was going to have to make him laugh more often.

The third one took less time.

“It isn’t like the others. It’s broken already. I’m pretty sure you snapped it yourself,” Hardison said, using his impressed but horrified voice. “Holy hell, man.”

Eliot shrugged. “After you do self-surgery with a pair of fingernail clippers, you get a pretty high pain threshold.”

“I wish I didn’t believe that, but the image is in my head now and dammit, I think I do.”

Eliot winked at Parker.

“I can smooth out the edges for you,” Hardison offered. “It’s all frayed and nasty.”

“Yes,” Eliot said immediately. It was one way Parker knew he liked whatever Hardison was doing.

Another way she knew was how relaxed Eliot was. When they’d done readings, Eliot had been strung tight, and she hadn’t thought much about it because that was Eliot’s default. Now, he was sleepy and soft. He was smiling and touching them without trying to pretend he wasn’t.  

When Hardison finally finished, it was getting bright outside.

“That’s all of it,” Hardison said. His voice was scratchy with exhaustion. He slumped down onto the bed in a tired puddle. “Y’all good? Because I’m tapped out.”

Parker was so proud of Hardison. She’d been angry with him before, using his powers to do bad stuff. But Eliot was right, they could still change. This was the kind of change they’d all needed, and Hardison had made it happen.

She patted Eliot’s leg and went to curl up next to Hardison. “We’re good. Go to sleep.”

“Eliot should sleep too. It’ll settle stuff.” Hardison yawed. “Brain stuff. Neurons. Synapses.” He yawned again.

“He will. Close your eyes.”

Hardison bumped his forehead gently against hers and fell asleep.

Parker picked up her head to look at Eliot. She didn’t know how to tell him that he should stay right where he was, that the bed was big enough, that it wouldn’t feel right without him.

She didn’t have to tell him anything. Eliot laid down at the foot of the bed, his body curved towards them but not touching. He held her gaze for a few seconds before closing his eyes.

It was weird that after everything they’d done together, this sleepy peace was what made Parker feel invincible.

 

 

 

That afternoon and evening, Parker counted Eliot’s smiles.

He smiled when she woke Hardison up by dropping Fruit Loops on his face.

“Sterling is going to be pissed when I tell him how last night went. Pretty sure he avoided telling us nicer ways of getting rid of triggers because he didn’t liked you. Ooh, I can’t wait,” Hardison said, and Eliot smiled.

In Lucille on their way to the Livingston mansion, Parker asked, “If Hardison is supposed to be in charge, can I still tell Sterling if his plan is stupid?”

“You do that,” Eliot said, with a smile just for her.

They were honest smiles too, the kind that Eliot seemed to like giving. Parker figured it was because Eliot was happy.

His happiness infected all of them, and by the time Hardison pulled Lucille onto the dirt road behind the Livingston house, she was giggling in the front seat over Hardison’s funny voices.

“If I’m pretending to be evil, I want an evil accent!” Hardison said. Only he said it, _eeeeeevil aaaaaccent_ , like that bad vampire movie he’d made her watch.

“I can do Russian,” Hardison continued, because he was making her laugh. “ _Vere are your nuclear wessles?_ Hear that?”

“That isn’t a Russian accent,” Eliot said from the back. “That’s pathetic.”

Parker didn’t care what Hardison and Eliot sounded like. She just cared that they were happy.

“The next job, Hardison gets to do a voice,” she decided.

“Yes!”

“No _,_ ” Eliot groaned.

Hardison parked Lucille in the same spot as last night. Sterling’s car was already there.

“Okay, settle down,” Eliot said. A shimmer of his smiles stayed in his eyes. “I told you, if Sterling thinks he can pull one over on us, he will.”

“I don’t like being Evil Empath Hardison. He’s so…evil.”

Hardison didn’t sound as happy anymore. Parker patted him on the shoulder. “We know you’re not him,” she said.

“They’re waiting for us,” Eliot said. “Let me get out first.”

Quinn was there, glaring at all three of them.

Sterling’s plan was actually a pretty good one. He was smart. Maybe as smart as Nate Ford, only Parker liked Sterling a lot less.

 “Mr. Quinn will cover you as you disable the alarms. Parker, Spencer, and I will navigate the house and get Olivia.” Sterling was only talking to Hardison, of course. He was rude.

She hated splitting up, but there was no other way to make this work. She nudged her powers into Hardison’s shoulder to let him know she agreed. Eliot brushed his fingers against Hardison’s arm, the two of them talking in that secret empath way they could.

“Okay,” Hardison said. “It’s a good plan.”

“I’m flattered,” Sterling said, not sounding flattered at all.

He kept talking to Hardison about psychic stuff, and Hardison was grifting for all he was worth. Quinn came over to where Eliot and Parker stood, a little removed.

“You bastard,” he said to Eliot.

Eliot stared him down. “Could have been your neck. Suck it up, Quinn.”

Quinn raised his eyebrows and Eliot made a face. “Oh, please.”

“What?” Parker asked. She could feel Quinn’s noise tapping on the outside of her brain, but he wasn’t trying to rip down her door and so she could easily keep him out.

Quinn opened his mouth and Eliot said, “Nothing. You,” he pointed at Quinn. “Don’t tell her stuff like that.”

Parker didn’t want Quinn to talk to her at all. He was exactly the sort of person she had hidden from at the Bureau—rough and dangerous, with hot eyes that followed her movements. When Eliot nudged in front of her, she slipped behind him gratefully.

“Heard you finally managed to shoot Chapman,” Quinn said. He didn’t actually seem all that mad at Eliot. “Congrats on that.”

“Long time coming.”

Quinn looked like he knew what Eliot meant. “God, I hated that prick.”

Eliot’s laugh wasn’t the one she liked best, but it was still good. “Here, check it out.”

Quinn cocked his head, like he was listening. A smile grew big on his face. “Headshot. Nice. Deserved worse, though. Next time, you should pull another Venezuela. Or, hell, call me and I’ll do it.”

“Okay, okay,” Eliot said, glancing back at Parker. “Enough.”

Quinn narrowed his eyes at her. “What? She’s Parker, ain’t she? Not like she’s squeamish.”

“You know who I am?” Parker asked, even though she didn’t want to talk to this guy.

Quinn snorted. “Every Bureau kid knows _Parker_. The one who ran and got away with it. I’d never seen the guards so pissed. They were ripping into us for months after your little stunt, so thanks a lot for that.”

Maybe Quinn was secretly a thief, because Parker felt like he’d stolen all the air.

When she had escaped the holding center, she hadn’t even thought about the kids she left behind. It wasn’t until years later, when she was learning how to have more feelings, that she recognized the sickness in her stomach as guilt.

She’d told Hardison that leaving had been the mistake she’d made. She just never expected to meet anyone her mistake had hurt.

Eliot pushed forward into Quinn’s space and rested a hand lightly on his chest, right where his ribs were. “You want to do this? Really? Because we both know who’s getting the beatdown.”

Quinn diverted his attention from her. His voice was exactly the same accent as Eliot’s. “If that’s what you’re into. You know I’m game for whatever.”

“Trust me, I know,” Eliot said. “That ain’t happening, so you can quit thinking about it.”

“Can’t, actually,” Quinn said. He grinned at Eliot. “You’re distracting.”

“And you’re impossible.”

“If you don’t like it, get your hand off my abs.”

Eliot pressed down hard enough to make Quinn wince. “You say another word to Parker and I’m snapping a second rib. Last warning, Quinn.”

“Someday when we meet, you won’t be wearing a leash. And then we’ll have some real fun.”

Eliot rolled his eyes and walked back to Parker.

She wasn’t entirely sure what that had been about, but mostly her brain was caught on the holding centers, running itself into a smooth track.

Hardison came over to them. She wanted to press close to him, because Hardison was the embodiment of everything the Bureau wasn’t. But Sterling and Quinn were watching, so she wrapped her arms around herself instead.

Hardison looked at her, concerned and frustrated that he couldn’t ask her what was wrong. “We’re ready to go. Time to split up.”

Parker nodded quickly.

Eliot’s hand flashed out and swiped against Hardison. Parker really hoped that he was telling Hardison everything she wanted to say: be safe, don’t worry about us, see you soon.

“Okay then. Forty minutes, right back here.” Hardison lingered, even though Evil Empath Hardison wouldn’t have. He needed someone to help him.

“Go,” Eliot said.

Quietly, Parker said, “And come back.”

 

 

 

It was easy to get into the Livingston house. Hardison had given them all earbuds and they just waited for him to break the security system. Quinn knocked out a guard.

“Thanks,” Hardison’s voice said.

“Whatever.”

Sterling was irritated that he had to crouch in the dirt with them at the edge of the woods, which made Parker feel better. She and Eliot exchanged a smirk.

“I wouldn’t be so pleased if I were you,” Sterling whispered. He sounded hissy.

“You probably would be,” Eliot said. “And I’m going to give you the same warning I gave you last night. Hands off.”

Sterling grumbled under his breath.

When Hardison told them to go, they went, slipping in the kitchen door.

Sterling took the lead as they crept inside. Parker picked the locks of the doors he indicated, one after another, leading deeper into the center of the house. Livingston locked Olivia up like she was his prize diamond. Parker didn’t like Sterling, but she was glad they were helping him steal her.

Eliot made the two security guards by the door go unconscious with two efficient punches. He laid them down quietly and Parker picked the last lock.

Sterling opened the door and there was Olivia, wearing running shoes and holding a small suitcase. She was older than the last two psychic kids they’d helped, but she still ran to her father and hugged him tight.

“Hello sweetheart. Did you do everything I asked?” Sterling said. When he let her go, he didn’t let her go far.

“Of course.” Olivia’s room was big, and the little light she had on didn’t reach the ceiling. That’s where the shadows were.

“What’s she talking about, Sterling?” Eliot was circling warily.

“Give it a moment,” Sterling said.

“Is this him?” Olivia asked. She was a serious kid, surveying Eliot with interest.

“Yes. I thought we could have a quick lesson.”

Parker didn’t like the way both Sterlings were looking at them. She said, “Eliot?”

They had the girl, they should be leaving.

Eliot was backing towards her, away from them. “Sterling, let’s move.”

Over the comms, Parker hear Quinn say, “What the fuck?”

Eliot put his finger to his ear. “What?”

“Um, guys, we’ve got some major company. Like, four SUVs and an armored truck levels of company. Get out of there now!” Hardison had totally abandoned his cover and was speaking frantically. “I don’t know how they knew. I squelched the alarms, how did they know?”

“Who is it?” Eliot demanded.

“Bureau. It’s the fucking Psychic Bureau.”

For the second time that night, Quinn’s voice ripped all the breath from Parker’s lungs.

The Bureau was here.

“It turns out Livingston was a more reasonable man than I anticipated,” Sterling said, pleased. “He was very willing to part with Olivia once he learned he would be taking the credit for turning in four fugitives from justice. The Bureau of Psychic Affairs pays well for bounties.”

Parker’s voice was frozen. She couldn’t speak.

The Bureau was here.

Eliot surged forward, but Sterling held up a hand and he stumbled back, clutching his head.

Sterling watched dispassionately before turning fond eyes on his daughter. “What do you think, darling? How might Moreau have done it?”

Olivia pursed her lips and held up her hand as well. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe…this, here?”

Eliot made a hurt sound. Hardison was shouting in her ear. Parker needed to save them.

But the Bureau was here and she couldn’t move.

Sterling gave Olivia an approving smile. “Clever girl.”

Suddenly Eliot was moving, faster than fast. Sterling was on the ground and Olivia was screaming, bent over him.

Eliot was breathing heavily. “He’d not dead. If you want him to stay that way, tell me how many there are.”

“I don’t know!” Olivia shouted. She was holding her hands up, but clearly she wasn’t a strong telepath yet, because Eliot was doing fine.

 Hardison was babbling. “Eliot, you’re not psychic, so they might not know you’re even here. We can use that.”

“Sterling said four fugitives,” Eliot said.

“What? Why would they even be interested in you?”

“Well,” Quinn said slowly. “It’s kind of a funny story, actually.”

“What did you do?” Eliot growled.

“I might have told the Bureau about you by accident one time. By accident! Anyway, they sounded pretty interested in your brain.”

“Dammit!”

Parker was a kid again, watching people get dragged off to the medical labs. People with interesting brains never came back.

“Quinn,” Eliot snapped into the comms. “Get Hardison out of here.”

Hardison said, “Like hell I’m leaving without the two of you. Where’s Parker? Parker!”

She wanted to say that Hardison needed to go, but she couldn’t speak.

Eliot glanced at her. “I’ve got Parker. Quinn, you owe me. Now more than ever.”

“Yeah, alright. I’ve got him,” Quinn said.

“Hardison, rendezvous three,” Eliot said. “Ditch your comms. They can hack the frequency.”

“Eliot,” Hardison said urgently. “Parker and the Bureau—”

“I know. Quinn, now.”

There was a sudden burst of static.

Parker was watching it all like it was a movie. Nothing felt real except the freezing terror in her bones.

Olivia was trying to wake her father up. Eliot ignored them and grabbed Parker by her elbow.

“Move, Parker!”

She couldn’t.

She couldn’t.

The Bureau was here.

 

* * * *

 

Parker’s defining trait had always been motion. Eliot had never imagined that anything could make her hold so still.  But now, nothing he did could make her walk.

Eventually, he picked her up and carried her out of the room. She was a statue in his arms.

There were people in the house, muffled orders and the sound of tactical gear clacking and jingling in the dark.

Eliot had memorized the layout of the mansion, but every corner he turned, the sound of enemies rushed up to meet him.

Parker was heavy. He’d put her arms around his neck, but she wasn’t holding on to him. He couldn’t fight if she stayed like this.

“Parker, we could use a little telekinesis right now.”  

Parker tightened her arms around his neck. That was maybe a good sign.

Eliot flattened them both against the wall as a searchlight shone through the windows.

Parker whispered, “They’re going to find us.”

“It’s okay if they do,” Eliot said. He could break a window and together they would make it across the lawn. “We can take these guys, you and me. Just like training.”

Parker’s arms were a death grip now. “No. Don’t fight them. Makes it worse.”

“Okay, you don’t have to fight anyone.” Without Parker to cover him, they’d have to use the back exit and find cover in the woods. He’d have to fight his way through the house.

“Get on my back, Parker. You don’t have to let go, just swing around.”

Parker had clearly done all she planned to do. Eliot had never seen her so afraid. It reminded him of Afghanistan, the new recruits who slipped into their own heads in the middle of a battle and couldn’t be shaken out of it.

The sounds of people with guns were getting closer.

Eliot could fight his way through if he wasn’t worried about protecting someone else. He could rescue Parker easier if he left her and came back later. But there was no way he was leaving her alone with people who made her this still when she should be full of motion.

The Bureau of Psychic Affairs didn’t usually kill. They captured. And Quinn had said they were interested in Eliot’s brain, so they would want him alive.

Parker was one of the most powerful telekinetics he’d seen, but she hadn’t been when the Bureau had her. They would have no reason to restrain her more securely. As soon as she snapped out of whatever this was, she could break them both free.

If they surrendered now, they would only be prisoners for a few hours.

“Parker,” Eliot said in her ear, just to say it.

When the team of agents burst into the room, Eliot turned to shield her and held up his hands.

The traqs hit him right in the back. As he slumped to the floor, the last thing he was aware of was Parker being pulled out of his arms.

 

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys, I've always been scared of tumblr. But you all are so much fun to chat with, so I'm dipping my toe in the waters. Stop by and introduce yourselves! Get more Leverage on my dash! My url is also laughsalot3412 because I'm terrible at thinking of usernames! Find me here: http://laughsalot3412.tumblr.com/

Eliot swam up to consciousness with his head aching. A subtle shift of his legs told him that his ankles were chained together. His arms were bound behind his back—two sets of military-grade plastic binders, impressive. He was on his side, skin pressing against cold concrete, which meant he’d been out long enough for them to transport him somewhere.

He opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was Parker.

She was awake and not restrained. She had wedged herself into a corner of wherever they were, arms wrapped around her knees, staring at him with unwavering concentration.

“You alright?” Eliot said, his voice rough after the drugs.

She just stared.

Not good.

Eliot maneuvered himself to sit upright and looked around. They were in a small cell—concrete walls and floor, a smooth metal door. Camera in the left top corner. Obviously a temporary holding cell, a stop-over to somewhere more permanent.

“Parker,” he tried again. “You hearing me?”

She nodded, rusty and painful. Eliot knew the signs of someone trapped inside their mind. He had dragged himself out of that place before, inch by bloody inch. Parker wouldn’t have to do it alone.

“Good. That’s good,” Eliot said. He smoothed everything out of his voice except calm. “I need you to tell me something you see.”

Parker licked her lips. “Your shirt’s green.”

“What else?”

“They tied you up.”

“If you think this is tied up, you’ve never met Russians. Now tell me something your fingers can feel.”

Parker tightened her hands around her knees. “Pants. My other fingers. Are we playing I Spy?”

They were walking through grounding techniques. “Sort of. What can you hear?”

“You.” The word woke something up inside her. Parker was finally seeing him, actually comprehending what it meant that he was here. Horror dripped into her face like blood. Lots of people had looked at him like that, but Parker never had. “No. No, Eliot, no.”

He pulled against the restraints on his arms, but they didn’t give. Dammit, he needed to _get to her_.

“Easy,” he said, making his voice something sturdy for her to grab onto. “Come over here.”

Parker jerked her head toward the camera. When enemies were watching, affection could be weaponized against them. But it was too late to play it cool, she’d been wrapped in his arms when they were captured.

“Cover’s already blown,” Eliot said.

She moved across the cell in skittish bursts and dropped to her knees in front of him, all her strings cut. “I have dreams about this. Bad ones.”

Eliot’s hands flexed against the binders with his need to reassure her. “This ain’t the same.”

“It is. They’re going to hurt you because of your brain, and they’re going to lock me up because I’m a thief, and Har—”

Eliot could see the blind panic flash in Parker’s eyes as she considered a new source of terror. “They don’t have him,” he said, fast as he could. “Quinn got him out.”

“You don’t know that!”

“I know Quinn. He’s an asshole, but he’s a damn good hitter. They were outside, their exit was already planned and easy to access. They’re fine.”

She had tears in her eyes. “Why am I—there’s something wrong with me.”

“Parker, you’re scared and panicking. That’s all.”

She put her hands over her eyes. “Make it _stop_.”

All he could do was strain up to rest his forehead against hers, like she’d done for him when his head was a mess. “Breathe when I breathe.”

She did, until her breaths became less shaky.

Eliot pushed himself back against the wall, ignoring the protest from his shoulder muscles. “Here.”

Parker scrubbed at her face and crawled into the space he’d made for her between his legs. She curled up against him, somehow making herself small enough to rest her head against his chest. Her hands clutched his shirt tightly.

“I’m sorry,” she said, muffled against him. “I know it’s my fault you’re here.”

“Well, I’m ready to go when you are.”

“There’s something wrong with me,” Parker whispered again. “It’s gone.”

The camera probably had audio, so they were being careful with their words. But Eliot had a bad feeling he knew what she meant. “Are you pre-Boston?”

Boston was where she’d unlocked her telekinesis.

“Yes.”

“Did they do something?” There were ways to get rid of psychic powers, none of them pretty.

She shook her head. “It’s _me_. I don’t know why.”

That put a hitch in Eliot’s escape plan. Nothing he couldn’t handle.

“I’m supposed to know!” Parker’s whisper was like a scream. “I’m supposed to be in charge, but I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s okay,” Eliot said. “I do.”

 

* * * *

 

“You’ve got to!”

“For the last time, I ain’t turning around.”

“Did you see the guys they had pouring into that house? Eliot and Parker are good, but they can’t survive the Uruk-Hai invasion of doom! They’re like the hobbits at the end of _Fellowship_ , man!”

“I don’t know what that is, and if you don’t shut up, I’ll throw you out of this van.”

“Lucille is my van, dammit!”

“Look at my face and tell me if I care.”

Quinn did not look like he cared. In the greenish glow of the dashboard lights he looked homicidal. His anger was battering at Hardison’s shields in a distinctly personal way, pointed and nasty. Hardison didn’t usually do things that made people this angry.

Hardison pushed himself farther back into Lucille’s passenger seat. He was shaking, fear and adrenaline sloshing together. He kept hearing Parker’s rapid breaths through the comms, even though Quinn had ripped out his earbud.

Eliot and Parker were out of his reach, neither of them with a GPS tracker or even a phone he could trace. And his van had been hijacked by a crazy hitter who was relentlessly taking Hardison in the opposite direction of where he wanted to be.

Hardison eyed the driver’s seat. He might be able to lunge at Quinn and catch him off guard.

“Try it and you’ll find yourself nursing a broken collarbone.”

This guy was rocking some Eliot-level spider sense.

“You promised Eliot you’d protect me,” Hardison said. Words were really his only defense against a guy like this. “And seeing as how you sold him out, I’d say you owe him big.”

 “I didn’t sell out anyone. And all I said was that I’d get you out. Never said how many pieces you’d be missing when Eliot came to collect you. How many fingers do you need to type on your little keyboard?”

When Eliot said stuff like that it was a joke, and the punchline was how little Hardison and Parker feared him—how much they trusted their bodies to his strong, careful hands.

It wasn’t funny with Quinn.

“All of them! I am in dire need of all of my fingers!”

“Then shut up about going back.”

Hardison had no reason to think Quinn would understand his logic, but he still begged. “It’s _Eliot and Parker_.”

Quinn’s glare was definitely not as impressive as Eliot’s. Its edges were nibbled and frantic. “And it’s the _Bureau_. Your playthings got taken away, tough. It’s better than being locked in a white room somewhere.”

Hardison skipped being offended and went right to panicked. “White room? Nuh uh. That’s no good for Parker, no way. Girl can sit in an air duct all day but she can’t be locked up. Not by them.”

Quinn yanked Lucille into a violent right turn. “They don’t give a fuck about what’s good for us.”

“Eliot’s with her,” Hardison said, pretending he and Quinn were having a comforting conversation. “He’ll calm her down.”

“If he’s smart, he’ll ditch her. Come back for her later or, you know, not.”

Hardison laughed, because he knew that if Eliot were here, he’d be laughing at Quinn too. Well, maybe on the inside.

Quinn snarled.

Do not antagonize violent people. That was a lesson Hardison had learned in high school and then spent his life ignoring, but it seemed prudent to bring it back now. “Sorry. If you knew Eliot, you’d know why that’s funny.”

“I do know Eliot. And I know why you think it’s funny, empath.”

Quinn’s brain was an alley full of cats shrieking in a hailstorm. Hardison tucked his shields more firmly into place. If he let them slip, he got a mouthful of blood.

But Quinn actually had made Hardison feel better, albeit indirectly. Eliot had Parker. Whatever nasty crap her childhood memories threw at her, Eliot could get her through. Soon, an email from Eliot or Parker would show up in the encrypted account Hardison had created for them. That account was rendezvous three—what they were supposed to use if they had to scatter without a safe house nearby. Hardison secured it on his own personal server. Only the three of them had access.

Until then, he had to share a road trip with a guy who hated him and not get his fingers chopped off.

They didn’t talk for another thirty minutes. Hardison pulled out his phone and logged into the email account. Nothing from the other two.

Hardison sent a blank email with just the subject line: “2 hrs west. Not all hitters are as fun as eliot. Come get me.”

He needed distraction.

“Hey Quinn. If the van broke down in the middle of nowhere and all you had was a Snickers bar, how long would you live?”

“Are you _threatening_ me?”

Hardison sighed.

 

 

They drove west on back roads without any traffic cameras.

Quinn actually didn’t remind Hardison of Eliot very much, once he looked past the accent and the punching. The way the man was fidgeting in his seat and his obvious fear of the Bureau reminded him of Parker. Early Parker, back when there was distrust between them. Except Parker had never had so much anger inside her, and she’d never spent hours pointing it directly at him.

“Eliot get in touch with you?” Quinn asked.

“Not yet.”

“Well, it can’t be much longer. Next crappy motel I see I’m stopping.”

Quinn’s hatred was making Hardison snappish. “Why does it have to be a crappy motel? It can be a nice one.”

“We’re in the middle of bumfuck Vermont at two in the morning. There’s no other kind, trust me.”

Sure enough, the motel Quinn found them was truly the most hideous place Hardison had ever stayed. The room was painted teal. It had a seashell border.

Hardison balked at the door. “I’ll wait in Lucille.”

Quinn lowered himself gingerly onto one of the queen beds. “I’m not sitting in that van for another second. Which means you’re not either. Close the fucking door, Alec.”

“It’s Hardison.”

“Whatever.”

Hardison pulled out his phone and typed another subject line: “Seaview Inn. Rutland County. Come get me, the bedspreads have dolphins.”

Quinn dug around in his pockets for an orange prescription bottle. He swallowed two pills dry, and Hardison remembered that Eliot had broken one of his ribs last night.

Quinn saw him remember. “Yeah, our boy can really pack a punch.” The grin he gave Hardison was not friendly. “Hot as hell when it does it, huh? Doesn’t matter what he breaks.”

“Ah, I wouldn’t really know?”

Quinn liked his discomfort. “Damn, the first time I saw him…”

— _lips on a glass of whiskey, fingers curled around a beer bottle, muscles sliding under smooth skin—_

“Ugh, cut it out.”

He didn’t like how Quinn’s thoughts turned Eliot into a collection of body parts. Hardison noticed Eliot, of course. He noticed Parker too. But not like that.

Quinn had clearly caught the tenor of Hardison’s thoughts. “Oh, don’t be self-righteous. Anyone with eyes can see how it is with you three.”

Hardison waved his hands, disgusted. “We’ve known Eliot for less than two months! And most of that time was spent not dying and figuring out how to be not terrible to each other.”

“So?” Quinn said. His anger punched through the fake nonchalance he was trying to convey. “Eliot and I only knew each other for four days.”

“It’s not like that,” Hardison said. He was getting angry too, Quinn’s emotions stirring fire inside him. Quinn looked a lot less scary sitting on his tropical fish bedspread.

“When is it ever, with Eliot’s special brain?”

“It’s not like that either!” 

“That’s not what was in Eliot’s head.”

The subject was still too raw for Hardison to discuss calmly. “We don’t do that anymore, okay?”

Quinn’s frustration was a burst of cursing pushing itself into Hardison’s thoughts. “You don’t read him. You don’t fuck him. You don’t let him kill people. If you don’t want to use him, let him go. I’ll take him off your hands.”

Every time Hardison thought he’d plumbed the depths of people’s awfulness, they surprised him.

“I,” he said, at a lost to even begin to put words to his revulsion.

“I’m dead serious,” Quinn said.

“For the love of all that’s holy, please stop talking.”

Quinn glared at him. “You should let him go.”

“I’m not holding him!”

Quinn’s anger roared at him. “Like hell you’re not.”

Hardison barely kept himself from shouting. “What is wrong with you? Eliot is with us because he wants to be with us.”

Quinn’s incredulity burst sharp in Hardison’s mind.

“You know what, fine! If you don’t believe me, see for yourself.”

Hardison lowered his shields all the way. He got a blast of Quinn immediately, fizzy snatches of sound that he didn’t try to resolve into words. He felt Quinn’s skim read prickling like getting feeling back into cold hands.

Hardison focused his mind and thought about—

— _chili and standing in front of danger and making fun of movies and the slow relaxing of Eliot’s muscles under Hardison’s hands and Eliot’s smile when he thought they couldn’t see him._

Hardison pulled back, but he left his shields down. “See?”

Quinn was bitter with a terrible kind of amusement. He eased himself around slowly and started heaping the pillows against the headboard of his bed. “Oh sure, Eliot Spencer is as sweet and cuddly as they come. The three of you are a big happy family. You know all that shit’s just one part of him, right? The part he wants you to see.”

Defensiveness rose in Hardison, because he knew it was true and wondered how Quinn knew that. This last week had shown that Eliot’s pits of darkness were well hidden and easy to stumble into.

“We know who Eliot is,” Hardison said.

 “Yeah? Tell me a job he did before he met you. One.”

“I don’t—how is that relevant?”

“One job, empath.”

“He worked for Moreau.”

Quinn settled himself back against the pillows. “Doing what?”

“Security. Assassinations. I don’t know, okay? Whatever things a guy like Moreau wanted done.”

“My god,” Quinn said, flatly.

Hardison shifted on his feet, self-conscious under Quinn’s scorn. “Look, I know he killed people. It doesn’t matter. We don’t care what he’s done.”

“Maybe you should. Because maybe those things are still fucking him up. And maybe you’re making it worse.”

“We are not—“

“Look at it.” Quinn sat up straighter. “Look at what it was like.”

Hardison backed away in the small room, his back bumping against the dresser. “No, I don’t want to see that.”

“Too fucking bad.”

Quinn’s powers were strong, sweeping over Hardison’s half-raised shields like floodwaters.

And suddenly, Hardison was in a fancy room with Damien Moreau, who should have been holding his attention but fuck it, Spencer was sprawled in one of the ornate chairs with Moreau’s hands all over him. Hardison was lost in the rapid flutter of Spencer’s pulse in his throat, the way he flushed when he met Hardison’s eyes. Moreau’s message was clear: Spencer was his to use.

The scene changed. Hardison wanted to help but he couldn’t, because Spencer was sitting hunched on a hotel bed, eyes fixed on Moreau standing over him.

 _“Exactly what do you think your place is?”_ Moreau tipped Spencer’s chin up, and the gesture staked ownership over every inch of him. “ _I’ll give you a clue; it definitely isn’t refusing me.”_

 _“I know.”_ What the fuck was Spencer doing, rolling over for someone he could snap in half? But he was, and his head was full of nothing but Moreau when he said, _“Tell me something you want me to do.”_

Hardison felt disgust and fury, and they were his own emotions but they were also Quinn’s.

Quinn drew out of Hardison’s head and Hardison came back to himself. His legs weren’t going to hold him. He wobbled over to the other bed and sat. He stared down at the bedspread and worked on breathing.

Eliot had told them enough about his time with Moreau to paint a picture. But it was another thing to actually see it. To be there.

Hardison covered his face with his hands so Quinn wouldn’t see his twisted expression.

But then Hardison thought about Quinn’s white-hot anger beating against him all night on Eliot’s behalf, and he took his hands away and let Quinn see. He kept his shields down too, so Quinn could read his honesty.

Quinn was watching him, eyes narrowed.

The similarities between the memories and the role Hardison had been playing were screaming at both of them. “All the stuff with Sterling was just a show. Eliot was just pretending.”

Quinn said, “It was his idea, though. Wasn’t it?”

Hardison was suddenly exhausted. “Yeah.”

Quinn’s anger was dialed lower than it had been all night. “Look, it’s not that I care. But I owe him, so I’ll say this once: you might not be asking him to, but Eliot’s used to selling his soul. And he likes to have his place.”

Hardison had always thought Eliot kept himself apart because he wanted it that way. Eliot was grumpy. Everyone knew that. When he pulled away from them, Hardison had assumed it was because he was a macho tough-guy, not because he felt like he didn’t have the right.

When Hardison saw Eliot next, he was going to hug that man to within an inch of his life. He wasn’t going to let him go until Eliot understood that he could ask for anything, question every decision, refuse all requests and they would still love him.

Quinn said, “I know that ain’t all domestic and nice like you want, but that’s Eliot. And you seem to want Eliot, so.”

“We do want him. Eliot is—”

 _Ours_ , was how that sentence normally finished. And he and Parker had both meant it nicely, a way to remind Eliot that he wasn’t alone anymore.

But maybe Quinn was right. Maybe Eliot had heard “ours” and translated that into something ugly, when they had meant for him to translate it as “family.”

 

 

* * * *

 

 

Eliot talked her through his plan in a secret voice, his mouth close to her ear. Parker had two jobs, he told her. Breathe deep and move when he said. She could do that.  

“I need to see the layout before we’re a go. They’ll come for me soon, and when I get back, we’ll talk strategy.”

Parker gripped his shirt tighter. Eliot couldn’t go with them. People who went never came back.

“Breathe,” he reminded.

Right. Parker had a job to do. She breathed in time to the rise and fall of his chest.

Parker had never been close to Eliot like this. When she wanted to wrap herself around someone, she always flung herself at Hardison. Hardison was soft and soothing, like curling up inside a blanket fort. Eliot was an actual fort—the kind with strong walls and locked gates. Even with his arms pinned behind his back, he made her feel safe.

Parker’s memories were pouring out from behind the door in her head. She was in the Bureau again. There was no way she could shove all those memories back. Sophie said when that happened, you had to let the memories out instead, pick someone to talk to and get rid of the poison. Parker had never tried that before, but she needed to do something. She couldn’t keep feeling this scared.

And Eliot was here, making her feel like she could try.

“There was a girl. Amy. We were at the holding center together. And she could draw in a different way, sort of draw what you were on the inside. She drew me on her plate with ketchup once, at dinner. They took her to the lab.”

Eliot was quiet, listening.

“And there was a boy everyone called McSweetheart because he stuck up for the girls. The other kids used to beat him up in the showers.” Parker rubbed the fabric of Eliot’s shirt between her fingers to remind herself where she was. “Did you ever let someone get hurt when you could have helped them?”

“Yes.”

That was why she could tell Eliot. Hardison would listen, but he wouldn’t understand. Anything she’d done, Eliot had probably done too.

“That job I did for Dubenich when I was little? I didn’t do it to be smart. I just wanted more food, and when I got it, I didn’t share it.”

Eliot’s nod bumped his chin against the top of her head. He said, “In Russia, I shot a guy in the leg for his sandwich. Wasn’t even that good a sandwich.”

“People were always dragging other people into dark corners. Guards, other kids, everyone. Have you seen that?”

“I’ve seen that.” Eliot’s voice was heavy.

“They never dragged me. Everyone said I was crazy, but I never was. I _never_ was.”

Eliot shifted, reaching for her before he remembered he couldn’t. “I was on a team that was doing stuff way over the line. Rough guys. And after one mission, our squad leader turned to me and said I was the most bloodthirsty son of a bitch he’d ever seen. Maybe he was right, I don’t know.”

“He wasn’t,” Parker said. “They’re never right.”

Parker realized she’d been breathing without thinking for more than a handful of minutes. The paralyzing fear was drawing back. The flow of bad memories was slowing.

She also realized that her weight was probably pushing Eliot’s bound arms into the rough wall. She climbed off, taking care not to jostle him. She crouched down and prodded his shoulder until he turned his back to her, understanding what she wanted to see.

They’d folded his arms and bound them with two sets of plastic handcuffs. It was a bad angle for him to snap them on his own, even if Eliot was that strong. Parker knew from experience that her teeth couldn’t gnaw through the plastic they used.

Eliot’s hands were mottled white and red. They’d tied him up tight. Parker rubbed at his arms and hands, coaxing the blood to start flowing. Eliot didn’t comment, but she knew it had to hurt.

She focused so hard on the plastic that she was sure, just sure, it would snap. She needed to get Eliot out of these cuffs. Then he wouldn’t have to let himself be taken away.

But no matter how hard she pushed or how deep inside she dug, her power didn’t come.

She hissed at herself.

“Don’t worry about it,” Eliot said, of course knowing what she was trying to do. “Not one of your jobs, remember?”

He didn’t sound angry that she was so useless, but she was angry at herself.

Eliot stood abruptly, surprising her into jumping to her feet. He turned on her, intense. “They’re coming. What’s about to happen isn’t the same as before. I’m not a kid and you’re not abandoning anyone. I’ll come back, and until then, you breathe.”

The door of the cell opened and four people with guns stood behind it. Two more grabbed Eliot and pulled him away without a word.

The door slammed shut.

Parker took a deep breath.

 

 

 

 

Parker breathed and thought about picking locks, that little click when everything fell into place.

Parker just breathed, and every time she did, she told herself that Eliot was coming back. Eliot sometimes lied to them, but never about stuff like this. If he said he’d come back, he would.

And he did.

Two hours and thirty-four minutes later, the cell door opened and a bad guy dragged Eliot back inside. Eliot was slumped against the guard like he couldn’t walk. Parker caught him when the guard shoved him towards her. They hadn’t untied him.

Eliot leaned back against her. There was something metal pressed between them, poking her in the stomach. Parker used him as cover to slip the pair of glasses he’d snagged into her pockets, and when she was done, Eliot straightened. He could stand just fine.

Parker turned him around, holding him by the shoulders just in case. She looked him over intently, top to bottom, multiple slow sweeps of her eyes.

“What are you staring at?”

Parker was relieved to hear his grumpy voice. “No blood.”

“Telepaths,” Eliot confirmed. He was settling into her grip, letting her hold a fraction of his weight.

“Bad?”

“They’re trying to figure out how Moreau turned my mind into his playground. Went in deep.”

Parker’s throat tightened. “So, really bad.”

Exhaustion was back in Eliot’s eyes after she’d worked for days to wipe it away. “I hate psychics in my head.”

It was the first time Eliot had ever said that. They’d known it was true, of course, but hearing him say it out loud felt important.

She wanted to say something, but the Bureau was almost certainly listening. She hadn’t cared before, but Eliot’s personal stuff wasn’t the same as her personal stuff. The Bureau knew everything she’d told Eliot anyway.

Eliot read her expression and groaned. “Parker, can we do this when I’m sitting down?”

They shuffled around each other. When they had their backs to the camera, Eliot muttered, “I got the layout. Use the glass.”

Parker squeezed his arm in acknowledgement.

“Here,” she said out loud, “why don’t we lie down instead? I’m sleepy.”

“I bet.” Only Parker would notice the sarcasm in his voice.

They maneuvered themselves to the ground. Eliot lay on his side, facing the camera. Parker curled up behind him and used the hidden space between their bodies to pop the lenses out of the glasses. She started grinding one against the floor, making a sharp edge.

This was going to take a while.

Her face was pressed into the back of his neck, like how she and Hardison sometimes napped on the couch. Eliot smelled like disinfectant and metal—doctor lab smells. She wanted to talk to Eliot about secret things, but he was facing the camera.

“One for yes, two for no,” she whispered.

Eliot’s finger tapped once against her arm.

“Are we breaking out the next time they come?”

One tap.

“Thirty minutes for the binders. That enough?”

One tap.

That was good. She couldn’t stand waiting behind again, now that she knew what they were doing to Eliot. Parker settled herself more comfortably against his back. “Are you alright?”

One very firm tap.

“Are you lying to make me feel better?”

Two hard taps, more like poking.

Parker let out the deep breath that had felt stuck in her throat since he left. Eliot squirmed when her air brushed the nape of his neck and Parker said, “Are you ticklish?”

“Don’t get any ideas,” Eliot growled.

Parker whispered, “Can I ask what they did to you?”

He tapped her once and hesitated, his finger hovering warm over her hand before slowly tapping again.

She hadn’t really expected him to tell her anyway. “Okay,” she said. The lens was getting steadily sharper. The need for stealthy questions was over, but she didn’t raise her voice. “What do you think he’s doing right now?”

She’d almost said Hardison’s name before, in her panic. She was careful not to do it now.

Eliot snorted. “Probably worrying about us.”

“But he’s safe, right?”

Eliot had no way of knowing any better than she did, but she still wanted to hear him say it.

“He’s safe. Now, quiet. I’m going to try to—sleep.” Eliot’s voice made the word mean something else. “And try to dream about diamonds, and knives, and kids that need saving.”

It was the litany she’d taught him to close the doors in his mind. She’d chosen those words to tell Eliot that his mind was strong, dangerous, and important, but she hadn’t thought he understood. He’d never tried to shield his mind without her ordering him to do it.

 Parker dropped the glasses lens for a second to fling her arm around him in an uncomfortable kind of hug. “That’s a good idea.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

They lay pressed together for ten heartbeats before Eliot said, “Ugh, Parker, get off.”

She smiled and went back to putting an edge on her piece of glass.

 

* * * *

 

 

Hardison was going to die. He would die of worry while the dolphin bedspread leered at him.

No messages from Parker or Eliot on his phone. He paced in front of the beds and typed: “if I have a heart attack in this ugly-ass motel room I hope you both feel bad.”

“If you don’t calm down, I’ll kill you myself,” Quinn said. He was still propped up on the bed, watching Hardison panic with a mixture of boredom and amusement. “You’re driving me crazy.”

“It’s getting bright outside. There’s no way it takes them that long to find an internet connection, it’s the 21st century, there’s wifi in parking lots. Do you think they know that Target parking lots have wifi? Everyone knows that, right?”

“Oh my god, _shut up_.”

“I have a nervous disposition, okay? It’s been way too long, they’re in some kind of trouble, I know it.”

“You already checked the internet or whatever. They haven’t been caught.”

Hardison had hacked the Bureau’s external database and neither of them had shown up in processing. He’d also hacked the state and local police for good measure.

“Eliot’s smart,” Quinn said. “If he’s lying low there’s a good reason.”

Hardison’s desperate need for distraction latched onto the warmth in Quinn’s voice. His affection was a camera flash, only illuminating parts of Eliot at a time, but it was still there.

“You really like Eliot,” Hardison said. If he didn’t think about something other than what could be happening to the other two, he was going lose it.

“Well, there’s a lot to like.” Quinn smirked. “Not that you’d know anything about that.”

Hardison ignored that last part. “So, what, did you two knock some people’s brains out and decide to grab dinner after?”

“Oh yeah. That’s exactly what we did, because we’re both such big romantics.” Quinn’s amusement was starting to be tinged with malice.

Eliot kind of was a romantic, though. Hardison had seen him watch _Titanic._ Hardison knew.

Quinn waved that away. He was grinning at Hardison now, the look of a man who’d stumbled into welcome entertainment. “Kid, you are missing out. I feel bad for you. I want to help.”

Hardison was starting to feel like this conversational gambit had been a mistake. “Um, I’m good. You don’t need to.”

“How else are we going to pass the time?”

And then Hardison could see it.

_Hard clash of mouths. Desperate, rough fingers holding him too tight, so tight it hurt, and it wasn’t enough for Quinn who always wanted it harder, rougher, bloodier._

“Quinn, that’s nasty! Ain’t nobody wants to see that!”

(It wasn’t the kind of kiss Hardison would associate with Eliot.)

Quinn caught that thought and laughed. “This is Eliot Spencer we’re talking about. What the hell were you expecting?”

Hardison’s mind flew to the feeling of Eliot’s two fingers on his wrist, gentle and light and trusting.

“Idiot,” Quinn said.

_—Eliot’s snarl, blood on his fist and Quinn’s face aching from where he’d been punched—_

Parker had made them stop by a fair on their way to Boston. Eliot had held her slushie while she threw darts, slanting a smile away from her.

“Seriously?” Quinn said.

Hardison had his own smirk now. He concentrated very hard on the memory of Eliot fussing about proper hair straightening techniques.

Now it was Quinn’s turn to look a little nauseated. “What the hell?”

“Quinn, you do realize that when you met Eliot, Moreau had him totally brainwashed.”

“And you don’t?” Quinn really did feel spooked, like Hardison had shown him something that nudged the foundations of his world just slightly off kilter.

“No, man. He’s just happy.”

“People in our line of work don’t get to be happy.”

Hardison felt bad for Quinn, then. Clearly the Bureau had screwed him over as much as Parker, but no one had helped Quinn piece himself back together.

As an apology, he focused on thoughts of last night: the delighted disbelief in Eliot’s smile, the freedom of his laughter, the way he reached for Parker without waiting for permission. In Hardison’s memory, the whole scene glowed.

Quinn stared at him, a riot of emotion. Eventually he said, “Shut up and check your internet thing.”

There were no new emails. Hardison sent another one: “if you guys are dead, I’m going to feel like a jerk for sending that last one.”

He sent it and then watched it come in, ready for them to see.

The words he’d typed looked scary, so he sent a new message: “you guys had better not be dead.”

And another: “Seriously. Don’t be dead.”

 

 

 

When it hit seven o’clock with still no word, Hardison had a flash of desperate genius.

“Quinn. Quinn!”

The man had been closing his eyes, but Hardison could feel that he wasn’t asleep. He grudgingly opened one eye. “For fuck’s sake, what is it?”

“They aren’t in the Bureau database.”

“You said that hours ago.”

“No, no, listen. They aren’t in the database, but all that means is they haven’t been taken to an official Bureau holding facility and processed. You said they were interested in Eliot’s brain, right?”

“Right,” Quinn said warily. “And I didn’t snitch.”

“Forget it, that doesn’t matter,” Hardison said. “The important thing is that the new director of the Psychic Bureau made research and experimentation illegal as of a few weeks ago. So if someone in the Bureau wanted to poke around…”

“They’d do it on the side,” Quinn said. He sat up straight. “Yeah. That sounds like them.”

Hardison’s fingers were flying over his phone. “They’d want to take them somewhere with their equipment. Somewhere small. Don’t they have holding cells all over the country?”

“They have one in Vermont.”

Hardison almost crushed his phone. “Excuse me, _what_?”

Quinn shrugged, but his emotions were all defensiveness. “What? You said the Bureau didn’t have them. How was I supposed to know that would be relevant?”

“If I wasn’t so busy right now, I would punch your face, I swear I would. Where?”

“Essex County,” Quinn said. “I don’t know exactly.”

“Are you sure?” Hardison demanded.

“I wasn’t exactly conscious when they brought me in last time, sorry for being hazy on the details!”

Hardison had used up all the patience he had for this hitter who wasn’t Eliot and this Bureau kid who wasn’t Parker. He grabbed the van keys from the bedside table. “It’ll have to do.”

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Going to get them.”

“That is insane. You don’t even know where they are!”

Hardison could feel Quinn’s fear. But Hardison was too full of _Parker and Eliot_ to be afraid. “I didn’t ask you to come with me.”

“Good! Because I happen to like my freedom!”

“Thanks for getting me out,” Hardison said. “And sorry for what I did to you. I’ll tell Eliot you said he has a nice butt.”

Quinn’s laugh was not a nice one. “They’re prepared for psychic snooping. Everyone they’ve got is shielded. You’ll never be able to find them.”

“I’m not just an empath.” Hardison had one foot out the door already. “I happen to know a thing or two about computers.”

 

* * * *

 

Closing the holes in his mind was hard to do and even harder to sustain. Eliot wasn’t used to thinking about his thoughts, maintaining them subtly in the background. He couldn’t quite shake the lingering feeling that he was doing something he shouldn’t.

But as the Bureau telepaths had pushed deeper and deeper into his memories, Eliot had felt resolution harden inside him. First the Sterlings, then the Bureau—it had been a bad night. He was just so damn tired of having people inside his head. The hard work his shields took was worth it.

Plus, he needed to make his brain less vulnerable if they were going to get out of here. Telepaths could rip through his shields easily, but all he needed was the few seconds pause it would give them. It didn’t take long to punch someone unconscious.

Parker had left each cuff hanging by a thread of plastic, easy to snap when the time came. Just as she was slipping the mangled bits of the glasses into her pocket, Eliot heard footsteps in the hallway.

He stood, rolling his shoulders to loosen them.

If Hardison were here, Eliot would be telling him things like, _Stay behind me_ and _Hang back until I clear the entrance_. He didn’t need to say any of that to Parker. She had already fallen in behind him, tense and ready.

The door opened and Eliot waited until he was surrounded by the guards, too close for them to use their guns effectively. They hadn’t sent one of the psychic doctors. A mistake.

Taking down those five guys was a pleasure. Parker’s stories had turned his anger into a concentrated fury. Plus, they’d been in his head. He was starting to want to hold people accountable for that sort of thing.

“Let’s go,” Eliot ordered as people yelled and the hallway started to echo with running footsteps.

Without hesitation, Parker jumped over the unconscious bodies and followed him.

Eliot gave her a fierce grin and she grinned back. Oh yeah. They were getting out of here in under ten minutes.

 Down the hallway, take a right. Two guards down. Three.

White lab coat meant psychic, and sure enough, there was the itching in Eliot’s mind before he kicked her in the face.

Take a left.

They were in the front office, a dingy room with wood paneling and brown carpet. The main exit was blocked by a group of men that fell under his hands. He loved this. It was one of the things that made him a bad person, but he knew he would never stop loving the rhythm of the fight, the way the world changed into a collection of objects in motion.

The door was clear. “Parker!”

A flicker of movement behind him. Not Parker. A guard across the room taking aim, and Eliot moved but there was no cover.

The loud crack of a gunshot.

No pain. No impact. Eliot spun around.

Parker had her hands outstretched, a bullet frozen inches from her fingertips.

She started to laugh. Eliot grinned again, or maybe he’d never stopped.

The front doors opened under his heavy kick, and they were sprinting across the parking lot.

“Let’s take the green car,” Parker called.

“That’s a Kia. I’m not driving a Kia!”

Eliot smashed the window of a blue Volvo with a hard swing of his elbow. There were people shooting at them, but Parker was still laughing. Eliot wasn’t concerned about bullets.

Fifteen seconds to hotwire the car. Three seconds for Parker to dive in next to him.

“Your plans are _awesome!_ ” Parker shouted as he raced the car out of the driveway.

Eliot swung onto the road just as a fleet of police cars and firetrucks screamed into the parking lot from the other direction. In the rearview mirror, Eliot could see policemen with their guns out demanding the Bureau agents’ surrender.

“What the hell? Why are cops getting involved with Bureau?”

“Who cares?” Parker said, ecstatic. “It means they won’t have time to follow us. Eliot! Eliot, take me to where there’s people!”

The Bureau facility faded behind them. Eliot had no idea where they were—somewhere in the forest, it looked like. “What do you want to do that for?”

Parker was actually bouncing up and down, and her joy was making him feel like his blood was carbonated.

“Because we need a phone!”

 

 

The winding backroad eventually yielded a gas station where Parker snatched six candy bars and an iPhone. Parker pulled up their secure email account as Eliot drove away.

“Hardison’s afraid we’re dead,” she said.

“Contact him.”  

Parker was still reading. “He figured out where we were. He told the police there were guys with guns holding hostages in a government building.” She looked up at Eliot and her brightness took his breath away. “He’s here, waiting somewhere close. He says he loves us.”

Eliot swallowed. “Contact him now.”

Parker typed something and sent it. Eliot couldn’t stop driving, even if he was going the wrong direction. He needed to move.

“I said I stole him two Snickers. They’re his favorite.”

“I know.”

Three agonizing minutes passed. Then Parker said, “He sent us a map. Take the turn up ahead.”

Eliot had been going the right direction after all.

“How long?”

“Go faster.”

Eliot pushed their stolen car as hard as he could. Parker was staring at the phone and giving tense directions. The road curved up a steep hillside, and the car couldn’t go fast enough.

“It’s coming up,” Parker said. “Eliot, what if—”

“He’ll be there.”

The thought had occurred to him too: Hardison dead or captured, someone else using his account.

“If he’s not?”

The crest of the hill arched up before them. “Then either we find him or the world’s gonna bleed.”

Parker made a contented sound.

At the top of the hill, there was a wooden sign proclaiming a scenic overlook. The only vehicle parked on the pull-off was their black van.

He slammed the car into park, spitting gravel from the tires. The door of the van was opening, and it was Hardison jumping out.

It was Hardison.

Parker’s telekinesis slammed open every door of the Volvo in her haste to get to him, and Eliot ran after her. For once, he wasn’t thinking about what his place should be, or what he deserved, or what he should want. As Parker jumped at Hardison and Eliot got his arms around him, around her, all he was thinking about was them.

Hardison was laughing into Eliot’s shoulder in a way that sounded close to crying. Parker was between them saying, “Hardison, it’s okay, Hardison.” Eliot fisted his hands behind Hardison’s back and locked the three of them together with all the strength in his arms.

“How did—?”

“Where—?”

“Are you—?”

The air between them was a babble of overlapping voices. It didn’t matter what they said. It all meant the same thing: _We’re safe. We’re here._

“Don’t ever scare me like that again,” Hardison said, muffled. “I can’t lose you two. Do you understand me? I can’t.”

“We’re okay,” Parker said. “Eliot got us out.”

“Yeah, well, Parker stopped a bullet.”

“Woah, really?”

“Don’t worry,” Parker said. “We’ll tell you all about it.”

 

* * * *

 

There was a lot to tell. The three of them sat at a picnic table and ate the candy bars she’d lifted. It was a squeeze to fit on the same bench, but they did it. Parker was glad. She needed Eliot and Hardison close to chase away the Bureau from her head. They talked for a long time, while the morning got brighter and more like afternoon.

Hardison liked the souvenir she’d brought him. Her first-ever stopped bullet.

“You two realize that breaking out of the Psychic Bureau is supposed to be impossible, and you did it in one night. Heck, Parker’s done it twice at this point.”

Parker hadn’t thought about it that way. “I have done it twice.” She liked the way that sounded on her tongue.

“Technically we hadn’t been processed,” Eliot said. “Not a genuine Bureau holding facility.” 

“So, what, you’re saying it might have taken you guys the whole day instead?”

“Nah, wasn’t saying that.”

The boys hadn’t complained about squishing close together on the bench. She figured it was an excuse for them to be sure of each other, sort of like how she was making herself sure of Hardison by resting her back against his. The view from the hill was scenic. The sign said so.

“Hey, um.” Hardison sounded hesitant. “Just wanted to say that your brain is rocking the new shields, Eliot. It’s a good look.”

Parker had figured Eliot’s shielding had worked when no telepaths took him down. She hadn’t realized that he was keeping them up around Hardison too.

“Figured it was time for a change,” Eliot said gruffly.

“Yes,” Hardison said. “Yes, I agree with you one-thousand percent. Do you want me to tell you if they slip? Until you get better at it?”

“That works.”

They were having another conversation underneath the surface, but Parker couldn’t decipher their code. That was okay. She knew enough to know that they were both happy with the result.

 

 

 

After Parker had almost fallen asleep once on Hardison and once on the table, Eliot said it was time to move. She curled up in the backseat of Lucille and closed her eyes. She didn’t actually want to sleep, just wanted to block out the distractions and listen to their voices bickering back and forth about what music to play.

She fell asleep anyway.

When she woke up, the van was stopped and Hardison was saying her name softly.

“Mm?”

“It’s okay, you don’t have to wake up. I got you.”

She clung to Hardison’s neck when he picked her up. She could have forced herself awake in a second, but after so many hours of being afraid, she was basking in feeling safe. She felt the sleepy warmth blot away the remaining bits of ice from the Bureau.

“Is she alright?” Hardison asked quietly.

“She’ll be okay.” Eliot closed a door behind them and opened another. Parker wasn’t sure where they were, but that was the whole point.

As a kid in the holding center, Parker had needed to be constantly alert, even when she’d slept. Letting her guard down would have been a death sentence. Or worse.

Now, keeping her eyes closed felt like the kind of change she needed. She didn’t have to be the mastermind with Hardison and Eliot, always plotting and keeping herself on edge. Eliot had taught her that. Trusting him to take charge in the Bureau had been one of the best things she’d done in weeks.

“I’ve just never seen her do this.”

Eliot said, “When you’ve been really frightened, it’s nice not to be.”

Parker smiled.

She did open her eyes when Hardison laid her down somewhere soft. They were in a bedroom, somewhere she’d never been. It had light grey walls. The bed was big.

Hardison tugged off his shoes and scooted in next to her.

She closed her eyes again and remembered the other night, feeling invincible. “Where’s Eliot?”

The bed dipped as he sat on the other side. “Right here.”

Good. That was good.

Parker went back to sleep.

 

 

* * * *

 

Hardison faded in and out of easy, dreamless sleep. When he finally came awake, he saw Parker curled up beside him, still breathing deeply, her eyes closed. Eliot was leaning on his elbow and watching them like the friendly neighborhood lurker he was.

Eliot had none of the heated energy that had painted him in Quinn’s memories, the ones Quinn had found so sexy. All Hardison had been able to see was the desperation. He liked seeing Eliot like this instead, at rest and content. Hardison propped his head on his hand and Eliot met his eyes. They didn’t look away.

(And didn’t look away. And didn’t look away.)

Eliot’s shields were muffling his emotions. It would have been normal on anyone else, but for Eliot it was eerily quiet. The only thing Hardison could feel from him were the same vague hints of emotion he got from everyone. Hardison had always known exactly what Eliot was feeling until now, staring into blue eyes that suddenly held mysteries.

For the first time, Hardison understood how people could think Eliot was unreadable. Without his brain bleeding out everywhere, Eliot was Da Vinci’s journal—written backwards and in code.

Hardison had always loved a good puzzle.

Eliot blinked slowly before slipping off the bed and out of the room. Hardison had hung around Parker long enough to recognize an invitation when he saw it. He wiggled away from Parker, trying to be stealthy.

Eliot was in the kitchen because of course he was. He was opening the refrigerator, empty because Hardison hadn’t had time to schedule a food delivery. The one-story house they were in had been the closest airbnb that accepted guests at such short notice.

Eliot had assembled all the food he’d found on the kitchen counter: an unopened jar of peanut butter, half a box of cornflakes, most of a bag of marshmallows, and four cans of olives.

“Yummy,” Hardison said.

“It’ll do.” Eliot rummaged around for a saucepan, which he put on the stove. He looked comfortable, at home in this strange house.

“What, you mean to tell me that you don’t travel with emergency stashes of fancy cheese and like, homegrown millet?”

“You don’t even know what millet is.” Eliot tasted one of the cornflakes before making an approving face. “And don’t be stupid. All I’ve got in my bag is that damn saltshaker.”

“The one I gave you?” Hardison was ridiculously pleased. He’d assumed Eliot had left it in Boston. “Aw, Eliot.”

Eliot gave him an unimpressed look. “It doesn’t even have salt in it. Here, stir the marshmallows until they melt.”

Hardison moved to stand by the saucepan. When Eliot handed him the spatula, Hardison sneakily tangled their fingers around the handle and used that to pull Eliot closer. Eliot let himself be pulled, a smile hiding in the corner of his mouth.

“There’s a conversation that needs having,” Hardison said.

“Always is, with you.”

Eliot’s shields wavered as their fingers threaded together. With Hardison and Eliot, touch had always been a signal for empath stuff.

Not anymore.

Hardison used his free hand to tap his temple. “Getting a little wobbly up there, man.”

Eliot frowned, concentrating, and his shields solidified. “Better?”

“You’re good.”

Hardison needed Eliot to be in his own mind when he said what he had to say.

“So. Um.”

Hardison wasn’t usually at a loss for words. He was a pro at rambling about anything. He’d even rehearsed this, the whole time he’d waited for them in Lucille. But he had no idea what Eliot was _feeling_. It was like jumping in the dark.

Eliot let go of his hand and nudged him toward the stove. “Stir the marshmallows before they burn.”

It was easier to talk when Eliot was a comforting presence at his back, not an intimidating blank in front of him. Hardison poked at the marshmallows. They were starting to melt.

“Okay, so, I’ve been thinking about triangles. You know how there are different kinds, right, everyone knows that. But do you know the strongest kind?”

“Who doesn’t?” Eliot said, with so much sarcasm that Hardison jabbed him with his elbow.

“The strongest kind is the one where all the sides are the same length. It distributes the weight evenly over the surface area. You can build bridges with that kind of triangle, you know what I’m saying?”

“Hardison, cut the geek.”

Hardison screwed up his courage and turned around to face Eliot. “We can’t be an equilateral triangle if you keep trying to make yourself the short side. I know it’s what Moreau wanted. Quinn showed me.”

Eliot’s face was a brewing storm. Hardison tried to dissolve it before it hit the mainland.

“He was trying to help, sort of. And anyway, it made some things make sense. Eliot, we don’t want anything Moreau wanted.”

“I know that, I’m not an idiot.”

Hardison couldn’t read the emotion in Eliot’s face. Anger? Amusement? This was exhausting—how did people ever know what this guy was thinking?

Hardison soldiered on. “I mean, seriously, you really think my ego needs you doing whatever I say? And Parker is already terrifying enough without minions. We want you with us. We’re a team.”

“We’re a little more than a team.” Eliot wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t frowning, so how could Hardison tell if the rasp in his voice was happy or not?

Parker said Eliot communicated through his body. Hardison tried to see what she would see: the loose cross of Eliot’s arms, his comfortable stance, how close he stood to Hardison with an entire kitchen at his disposal.

Hardison thought about seeing him again for the first time, Eliot barreling into him and Parker so hard that he’d pushed Hardison back against Lucille. Then, this morning, Eliot staying with them while they slept. Not curled at their feet this time, but stretched out side-by-side.

“You agree with me,” Hardison said. “Don’t you.”

Eliot was watching him just as carefully. “I’m starting to see your point.”

“He has a good point.”

Parker appeared beside Hardison’s elbow, which always made him jump. “Woman, you have got to stop scaring the life out of me!”

“I can’t help it that you don’t pay attention.” Parker patted him on the shoulder in apology anyway. “Are we telling Eliot that he’s important?”

“I think we’re having a geometry lesson.” Eliot was definitely amused.

“That’s just hurtful. Here I am trying to have an honest conversation and you’re making rude comments.”

“You always make it too complicated,” Parker said, exasperated. She was full of energy after her nap, dancing around them on her tiptoes. She whirled close to Eliot and poked her finger into his chest. “This doesn’t work without you. Okay?”

Eliot batted her finger away. “Quit poking me.”

“Okay,” Parker said, satisfied. She turned expectantly to Hardison, awaiting his praise.

But Hardison had thought he’d understood Eliot before and he’d gotten everything wrong.

“Eliot,” he said, knowing he was on treacherous ground, “do you want any of that too?”

Parker stopped flitting around the kitchen to hear the answer.

Eliot pushed past him to take the saucepan off the heat. “Don’t you know what I want?”

“No, I’m in the dark here, man. You’ve got shields now.”

Eliot’s smile was pure delight. It caught Hardison’s breath in his throat and made his answering smile a little stunned.

Parker was bouncing in place. “Eliot, will you tell us?”

“Yes,” Eliot said. Zero hesitation. “But I have to do something first. Give me four hours.”

“There’s no pressure,” Hardison said, though he felt like he was going to implode with the need to know. “Take as long as you need.”

Eliot opened the jar of peanut butter and mixed it in with the melted marshmallow. “I need four hours. And an untraceable phone.”

 

 

* * * *

 

Eliot made her amazing food with cornflakes, then Hardison gave him a phone and the keys to Lucille.

Eliot paused at the front door to say, “Order us something good for dinner.”

Parker knew he said it for Hardison, who was worrying his lip between his teeth. She nodded to Eliot to let him know she could take care of it. He gave her one of his quick-flash smiles before closing the door behind him.

“I messed it up,” Hardison said immediately. “I shouldn’t have mentioned Moreau. Or maybe I should have kept triangles out of it, but you have to admit it’s the perfect metaphor!”

Parker took another bite of the marshmallow cereal bars. “You did good.”  

“But he’s gone!”

“Eliot comes back. Sometimes people need to do private stuff. I have my warehouses I check on without you. You have your orc battles you play without me. Eliot’s never had an alone thing before.”

Hardison stopped freaking out long enough to consider that. She liked that about Hardison, how he was always willing to entertain her ideas, even when they were weird ones.

“You make a good point.”

“Another change,” Parker said.

“Probably another one we needed.” Hardison wasn’t biting his lip anymore. Parker had said a good thing.

It didn’t mean that she wasn’t impatient for Eliot to finish whatever he had to do. Parker was pretty sure she knew what he was going to tell them, and she was dying to hear him say it.

But until then, she had Hardison. She’d missed Hardison.

“Will to help me test my powers? I need to check that they’re back on all the way.”

Hardison turned out to like throwing pillows at her. He liked it a little less when she sent them zooming straight back towards his head.

 

 

* * * *

 

Eliot knew what he wanted.

It was bone-deep certainty, the kind he hadn’t known he could feel anymore. His body, mind, and heart were in perfect agreement. When he held still, he could feel everything inside himself humming in harmony. The last time he’d felt that way he’d been nineteen, stepping into the army recruiting office.

He knew what he wanted, and dammit, he _wanted_ it. Eliot was almost positive it was his for the asking.

But first, he had some calls to make.

 

* * * *

 

 

In the end, Eliot was actually only gone for three hours and forty minutes. Hardison had just put the call in for pizza when he came back. Hardison had expected—what? Eliot covered in dirt or blood. Maybe carrying grocery bags full of organic vegetables.

But Eliot looked the same as when he’d left and he wasn’t carrying anything. Clearly he’d been successful. He was trying to hide how pleased he was, but Hardison could see it.

He could also feel it—satisfaction drifting off Eliot in easy waves.

“Welcome back,” Hardison said. He tapped his temple.

Eliot growled under his breath, but he paused in the entryway and soon his shields were back to full strength. Hardison gave him a thumbs up.

“Hi!” Parker called. She’d become particularly fond of a certain corner of the ceiling as she’d experimented with her powers.

Eliot didn’t bat an eye at the sight of her hanging upside down. “Hey.” He tossed Hardison his phone. “Got you something.”

“Pretty sure I gave you this before you left, but thanks?”

Eliot stretched his neck and shoulder muscles, like he’d been tensed up the entire time he’d been gone. “It’s what’s on the phone, genius.”

Curious, Hardison opened it up and dug around. There were lots of files that had been received recently. He hadn’t thought Eliot knew how to get documents on his phone.

Hardison opened a few.

He opened a few more.

“Eliot,” he said.

Eliot wasn’t even trying to hide his satisfaction now.

“Eliot, _what_? Are these what I think they are?”

“You bet.”

“What are they?” Parker flipped down and came to peer over Hardison’s shoulders. “Lab roster,” she said, reading the titles of the files. “Points of contact. Supervisor info. Huh?”

Hardison was just staring at Eliot. “How did you get this?”

“I’m the retrieval specialist.” Eliot saw his expression and relented. “I have a guy in the NSA who owes me a big favor. And it turns out Bureau agents aren’t all that committed to cyber security when you’ve got one of them in a headlock.”

“You went _back_?”

“Their security is pathetic.”

Parker poked Hardison’s shoulder hard. “Tell me what’s going on!”

“This is Bureau information,” Hardison said. He swiped through some of the files. “Names. The people who knew about the experiments. It’s like chapter one in the black book of Psychic Affairs.”

Parker circled the phone like it was venomous. She ended up next to Eliot. “Why do you need names?”

“I figure it’s a good place to start if we’re going to take down the Bureau.”

Parker grabbed Eliot’s shoulder. “Wait, is that we’re doing? Yes. Yes, let’s do that. Hardison, can we do that?”

Hardison’s own excitement was rising to meet hers. “They scared you and went into Eliot’s head. Hell yeah we can do that. I would love to do that.”

Eliot was just as excited as they were. Hardison could tell by the relish in his tone when he said, “It’s going to take a lot of planning. But I say we burn them to the ground.”

“Yes!” Parker cheered.

“Yes, absolutely,” Hardison said. “Um, you are speaking metaphorically, right? Like, we destroy them and don’t actually light anything on fire?”

“There could be real fire,” Parker said. “That’s okay with me.”

“Fire is cleansing,” Eliot agreed.

“I told you, you have awesome plans.”  

Eliot nudged her with his foot. “Now ask me the other question.”

Hardison felt his heartrate kick up a new notches. Parker’s hands squeezed Eliot’s shoulder tightly before letting him go. Hardison moved to fill the space they’d left open for him, completing their circle. Eliot looked a little embarrassed, the way his face got to hide his feelings underneath. He wasn’t hiding very deep, though. His affection was in every soft line of him when he pressed his shoulders against theirs.

“Okay,” Parker said quietly. “What do you want, Eliot?”

“This,” Eliot said. His gesture took them all in, standing shoulder to shoulder. “Us being the good guys. Together. Team or more than a team, whatever. _Us_.”

Parker clutched her hands together. She looked like a firework. “That’s what I want.”

They both looked at Hardison. “Of course,” he said. His throat was aching. “Of course that’s what I want.”

In that moment, Hardison could feel them changing into something strong. Something unshakeable.

Something right.

Eliot said, his voice low, “’Till my dying day. You hear me?”

“Silly,” Parker said. “We’re not going to let you die.”

“Going to be a long time in each other’s company then.” Eliot looked like the prospect was a good one.

It certainly was to Hardison. He couldn’t stop smiling. “I love you both too.”

Eliot groaned. Parker wrinkled her nose.

“Someone has to be the emotionally vulnerable one!” Hardison protested, but their expressions were both so offended that he couldn’t make his voice anything other than happy.

“Eliot, make him stop,” Parker said and kissed Hardison’s cheek like she hadn’t.

“Look at the damn files I stole for you,” Eliot grumbled. “I had to call in a favor that wasn’t cheap. Been saving that for years.” He rested his hand on Hardison’s back and gave him a look that dared him to comment.

Ah, his people. His weird, amazing people.

“Okay, fine, let’s go burn down the Bureau. Y’all are going to blow us up, I can see it now.”

“There are very safe ways to detonate a building, Hardison,” Eliot said. “Just because your mind goes immediately to, I don’t know, rocket launchers or something—”

“Who said anything about rocket launchers? Definitely not me.”

“I want one!” Parker stuck her hand in the air, narrowly avoiding hitting Hardison in the face.

“Look what you’ve done,” Hardison said.

“I didn’t do anything, you’re the one who brought it up!”

There was so many emotions in the room, and the only ones Hardison could feel were his own. It was weird, but good. He didn’t need his powers to understand them—not Parker and Eliot. If they were puzzles, they were ones he wanted to spend his life solving.

(If they were puzzles, they were three with shared pieces, fitting together in series of perfect clicks that sounded like home.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, you crazy kids!
> 
> Also, the memories Quinn has are snippets of a REAL LIVE STORY called "Catching Hell" and I totally recommend it. Read it http://archiveofourown.org/works/6716263/chapters/15358990


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